The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Game of Go:
Human Capacity or Machines

Apr 11, 2016

A computer called DeepMind, developed by Google, beat Lee Sedol, the Korean champion of the game of Go, by four games to one. That gave rise to many comments on the theme, will people be overtaken by machines?

But if a person can compete with a modern computer capable of calculating many more moves in advance, that only means that human intelligence can’t be reduced to simple calculations and is in fact much more complex.

Human intelligence is, in reality, responsible for the computer’s victory. It required the cumulative intelligence of scientists and engineers coming from very different fields, capable of making a sophisticated machine, but this was human intelligence and nothing else.

Machines are the product of women and men who conceive and build them. There is no reason to be worried because of the victory of a machine in this game that was also invented by human beings.

Science fiction likes to imagine machines escaping the control of humanity. Today, it’s not machines that have escaped human control, but our social organization. But this social organization is also nothing other than the product of humanity’s own activity. And the task that we need to carry out is to consciously master our economic and social organization, organize it rationally, and plan it. This is called communism.

And another thing is certain–we can’t count on machines to accomplish it for us.