[jyl]

I don't know, about the hardware used. You can fit a hell of a lot of computing power in 160 lb so I'd guess that would be eventually be a manageable constraint.

Yes, humans act differently than computers, but the same challenge was faced with Go. In match 4, when Sedol played unconventionally, Deep Mind was thrown off, but it adapted and came back to win match 5.

I don't think an AI F1 driver would have many fans, but who knows. I don't see why it wouldn't be exciting racing. Deep Mind apparently played unconventional, unusual strategies and by all accounts the matches were exciting, as far as Go matches go :-)

Here is the deeper question, that we're discussing in the context of F1. How good can AIs be at human activities.

We talk sometimes about self driving cars. If an AI will be a better, safer, more reliable driver than most human drivers, even professional drivers, then will there be a role for human drivers?. Maybe the millions of truck drivers, cab drivers, Uber drivers, train conductors, airline pilots, all go away. Or have to work for wages competitive with the ever-declining cost of computing. Even a minimum wage worker costs quite a lot in annual expense, compared with the one-time cost of buying a computer.

Yes, AI software costs billions to develop, but maybe it can be amortized over thousands of applications and tens of millions of instances. Deep Mind is not a specialized AI that can only play Go. It learned and mastered dozens of video games, just by playing them. Suppose you own a trucking fleet and could replace each human driver with a $10K AI? Wouldn't you do it?

"Yeah, that's just low skill work" might be a response. But if an AI can be a world class F1 driver, then can an AI be a top airline pilot? A top fighter pilot? A top neurosurgeon? A top securities trader? A top software developer? A top chef?

Right now, "high skills" are one way that people can win in the struggle that is the economy. If you are a skilled pathologist or radiologist, you make a fine living. But can an AI do as good a job at reading CT scan images and stained tumour samples? Suppose it can. Wouldn't hospitals start to replace their human pathologists with AI pathologists? Especially if the AI can use essentially the same interface as the human, so you don't need a lot of capital investment, don't have to rebuild the physical lab and equipment. Replace your $200K/year human pathologist with a $50K AI?. Why not?. Maybe you'd keep the very best human as supervisors and head of the pathology department. But as the decades go by, where do the new human pathologists come from to replace them?

Substitute other jobs for pathologist or truck driver. Some jobs seem impossible for an AI to do. But until now, the job of "Go grandmaster" seemed impossible for an AI to do. Now it is clear that, if AIs are allowed to compete, future Go grandmasters will be AI, not human.

I think it would be extremely interesting to set Deep Mind or a similar AI to playing a first person combat soldier game like Call of Duty. Perhaps the first thousand games would be disasters for the AI. But it can play ten thousand games, learning from each one. It can go on multiplayer networks and play against humans, a hundred games simultaneously, learning from each one. And then, I believe, when this AI becomes a top player, it can be replicated for just the cost of the computing hardware. Is it a huge step from that to an AI that can actually be a combat soldier?. Okay, that raises mechanical engineering challenges that might be hard to solve. But how hard are the mechanical engineering challenges of fitting an AI into the cockpit of an F18, F35, or whatever the US fighter plane in 2030 is?