The AI system AlphaGo discovered strategies in the game of Go that human beings didn't even know that they didn't know. AI then is capable of discovering both known unknowns and unknown unknowns in fields from games to protein folding. Hall and Vold here argue we should therefore not only see AI as a tool, but as a teacher. We should learn new ways to think from AI, not only focus on its outcomes. We should learn how the AI beat us at Go, rather than just lamenting our defeat.

This is part 2 of a 2-part series on AI and Human Creativity. Read Part 1 on the dangers of AI to human creativity by Armin Schulz.

Contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can not only outperform humans in certain tasks, but they are also able to do things that humans have not yet figured out — such as identifying entirely new strategies to beat World Champions at the strategy game Go. As intellectual work that was once uniquely human is increasingly performed by machines, popular literature on the present and future of AI tends to focus on ethical concerns of bias and fairness, misinformation and fraud, human replacement, and alienation. While there is plenty to worry about, there are also reasons for optimism. AI is moving from simply being faster and more powerful at processing information in otherwise human-discovered domains of knowledge to actively expanding those domains. We now need to try to understand and learn from our machine counterparts because they are our best bet for solving pressing real-world problems.

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