Computers match or surpass top humans in chess, Othello, Scrabble, backgammon, poker, even Jeopardy. But not Go.
This is still one of my favorite posts of all time. Just stumbled upon this.
Interesting story up until the explosion of vitriol in the very end, where he attacks the dramatisation of science in the popular press (which is a strawman to anyone with either half of a brain) and refers to the beliefs of "Ray Kurzweil and other futurists" as "breathless idiocy" (while apparently equating it with its media coverage). Stephen Hawking vocally advocates taking measures now to avert the danger of increasingly powerful AI making us obsolete; I certainly wouldn't consider myself qualified to describe anything that Hawking propones as "breathless idiocy" -- all the more so if I were an assistant professor of philosophy and religion opining about a hard science topic. But what can we expect from a science article in the popular media?