The advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) is something I talk about a lot because I truly believe that our world and our civilization will never be the same once its full potential is unleashed.

In fact, we have already begun noticing their effects on our lives and we are simply oblivious to it. Take your virtual assistants on your phones for example. They are being enhanced with more and more AI capabilities every year and we enjoy the fruits without thinking about the technology behind them.

Another use case which has been getting really popular is their use in autonomous cars. Tesla’s electric cars for example, comes equipped with a feature called Autopilot which uses AI to get better at autonomous driving.

In a more distant future, AI could be running our cities and even our countries due to their learning and strategizing abilities that will be far superior to us. In fact, we have already begun seeing that trend begin.

AI Masters Chess In 4 Hours

Some months ago I had written about how Google’s DeepMind had created an artificial intelligent program called AlphaGo which bested the world champions at a game that was not entirely based on strategy and also used intuition.

Well, the latest news from the same company is that another one of its program called AlphaZero has now mastered chess and that too in just 4 hours. Since chess is a purely strategy based game, this had to be coming sooner or later.

AlphaZero was programmed with just the rules of the game and no strategies were fed to its program. It learned everything on its own, by using self-playing reliance which is called reinforcement learning in the field of AI. Tesla’s autopilot uses similar technique as well.

After mastering the entirety of humanity’s chess knowledge, AlphaZero bested the highest rated chess program called Stockfish. It beat the program 28 out of 100 times. The rest of the games ended in draws.

Anyways, this goes to show the capability that AI has already started to gain. Think about how powerful it would be and the kind of work it would be able to do in the coming decades. Even sentience doesn’t seem too far-fetched of a goal right now.

A World Governed By AI?

Now, I’m not talking about a scenario where AI becomes self aware and decides that humanity is the scourge of the planet and wants to get rid of us once and for all.

I am talking about a more saner version of reality, albeit strange and unlike anything we can imagine today. What I’m saying has probably been already written about in fiction novels.

How would a world governed by AI look like? When AI gets to a point where it surpasses our ability to strategize and make the most effective and efficient decisions, I think it would make sense to a future generation to replace humans from the governing jobs with AI.

Think about it, instead of governments, there would be one AI. There could still be different countries, each with its own AI. If they are programmed in such a way that in addition to having their own country’s welfare as the main goal, world peace would also be a priority.

Devoid of all human bias, greed and other negative attributes of ours, the world could finally know peace and since we would have a super intelligent decision maker, our countries could prosper thanks to the near perfect execution of every little thing. Algorithm like AlphaZero could really be used for such a purpose in a more distant future. Whether or not we should do it, is another matter.