Our new series The Last Invention continues with Episode 3: Playing the Wrong Game.
For decades, the quest to build intelligent machines played out on game boards and TV sets — Tic-Tac-Toe, chess, Jeopardy.
Each time, the machines won.
Each time, many believed that we had arrived at a turning point, that the age of AI was finally on the horizon.
And each time, they were wrong.
But all of that would change in 2012, thanks to one group of computer scientists who had been long on the fringes, dismissed for decades by mainstream AI research. Their breakthrough would accelerate the race to AGI — but would also add an element of black-box uncertainty that ultimately came to frighten even some of them.
