AI problems are always mysterious until they're solved. People say this sort of thing every time an AI achieves some task which had previously been deemed impossible.
There's truth there but this line is over-used. Playing chess better than a human was never deemed impossible and the ultimate solution doesn't seem to have any crazy insights that would stun a researcher from the 1960s. (You can read the source for Stockfish which is state of the art and open source). The improvements came in the form of more and more horsepower through hardware, more and more efficient innovations in the tree search very specific to the game of chess (bit board representation, move ordering), and simplifying evaluation and tweaking parameters according to unsupervised learning. Correct me if I'm wrong?
At the end of the day, chess (and go) are discrete games with perfect information played one turn at a time according to a tree of simple and trivially determined possible moves with clear criteria for winning. I don't see why we'd put this on a pedestal as the example of something generally considered uniquely human, so we'd better expand our imaginations of what we can achieve with AI. As the parent said, the mistake may have been in supposing there wasn't a solvable evaluation function for Go positions when in fact, through some more human ingenuity, there is.
Does that mean we aren't intelligent? Or does it mean that the system isn't intelligent but that we are "because we do it differently"? Or do we accept at that point that intelligence is composed of simple building blocks interacting in complex ways (which we already know, if we eschew Cartesian duelism)?
Although I actually think that we'll never make a system that does _everything_ a human can do at all, simply because that would be silly.
And of course, there also has never been a human who can do everything that humans can do, so this bar is way too high anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...
While progress came not as quickly as AI researchers (or their universities' publicity departments) had hoped, computers can now do a lot of the things that he wrote about for example in "What computers can't do".
He reacted with skepticism when Newell and Simon said in 1957 that a computer would be world chess champion by 1967 and, well, he was right to.
He said that the computational techniques in use for computer chess in the 1970s wouldn't be capable of producing a world-class player, and he was probably wrong about that -- largely, I guess, because he didn't foresee how big an impact a performance improvement of ~10000x could have.
If he actually claimed that playing chess better than humans was impossible, can you say where?
On the day they build a walking, talking AI who can converse fully with a human, write a symphony, design a building, feel and express emotions and all the rest of the things we define as being essentially in the domain of humain intelligence, everyone will say, "But of course, none of those things required intelligence at all. This is all an elaborate collection of illusions and ugly hacks."
And they'll be right, but I suspect that the brain is the same way.
Because mapping problems to pre-existing algorithms is bread and butter of computer science and software engineering. To be groundbreaking a work needs to change our understanding of the underlying issues. In a lot of popularized cases that does not happen.
i think the opinion that humans are less special than we once thought, especially on expansive time scales, will only become more widespread.