Denigration wasn't the right word, but I was weary after staying awake through three hours of Korean afternoon.

I couldn't find the Hofstadter quote was looking for either, where he explains how neurons count incoming impulses and fire if they hit a threshold. Adders and logic gates.

Maybe I was a bit paranoid after reading an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I was getting a creeping sense of menace watching Lee struggle.

AlphaGo got to be good by watching humans, like human children do, but it goes beyond imitation. A company representative said that AlphaGo gave a 1/10000 chance that a human player would make an unusual move that AlphaGo played in Game 2.

Today humans understand how AlphaGo plays go, and don't understand well how humans play go. As long as humans get superior results, the AI is a novelty. A backgammon AI is also a novelty. But it is hard to believe that our creations won't eventually branch out beyond manufacturing and game playing.

I recall you thought Yudkowsky was overreacting to AlphaGo's early success. Is there another capability that you would watch out for as a more significant sign? Suppose BetaGo maintains a flock of complex go-playing-programs generated by genetic algorithms, and uses the best ones to beat human champions. Perhaps no one could explain how the winning algorithms work. Would that be meaningfully different from what we call intelligence?