Are we prepared for the rise of artificial intelligence?

South Korea's Lee Sedol, the world's top Go player, waits after putting the first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo, as Google DeepMind's lead programmer Aja Huang, left, sits during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match in Seoul, South Korea, March 9, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

ON THURSDAY, Lee Se-dol, one of the world's leading Go players from South Korea, was beaten again by AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program developed by Google's artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind, in the second of their five games in Seoul. Their games are widely seen as a contest between human and artificial intelligence. Whatever the final result is, humans are the winner, people still need to prepare for a possible future dominated by artificial intelligence, said Beijing News on Thursday:

The question is whether artificial intelligence will finally surpass human intelligence?

The board game Go had been seen as an insurmountable difficulty for artificial intelligence developers. But now AlphaGo has beaten one of the best players in the world.

In 1997, the super computer Deep Blue developed by IBM eventually beat the international chess master Garry Kasparov at least once.

But Deep Blue could not play any other board game, because what it could do depended on its program, according to its developers.

However, today's artificial intelligence is much more than that.

Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, said he is creating a general learning system that uses adaptive algorithms that mimic biological systems.

Why cannot artificial intelligence overtake human intelligence, if it continues to evolve in this way? Are we really prepared for the coming of that day?