The Move 78 for Humanity

There were two moments that bookended this year’s Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) in Cleveland that summarized both the conference and the state of AI to me.

The first was during Paul Roetzer’s opening keynote when he talked about the now-famous “Move 37” in a game of Go between world champion player Lee Sedol and AlphaGo from Google Deep Mind, an AI program capable – even in 2016 when this happened – of instantly calculating near-infinite potential Go moves.

Sedol was the undisputed world-best Go player when he agreed to go up against AlphaGo and expected to beat it handily.

But in the clip from the documentary that Paul shared, Sedol’s confidence is quickly shaken when AlphaGo wins the first three games. He takes a smoke break to collect himself, only to return to find that AlphaGo has made a move that he’s never seen before – the famous Move 37 – and loses the game.

What follows is a heart-wrenching sequence where Sedol, hands fidgeting from anxiety, talks about how he’s let so many people down and how his “weakness” led to his failure. You get the sense that a part of him has been shattered.

Score one for the machines.

But that’s not the end of the story. During a later game, as Sedol studies the Go board, he sees and executes another move – Move 78 – that essentially causes AlphaGo to lock up, giving Sedol the victory.

Score one for the humans.

Nurturing the Candle of Consciousness

The second moment came at the very end of the conference, during the closing conversation between Paul Roetzer and cosmologist Brian Keating, who studies the origins of the universe.

An unabashed AI optimist, Keating talked about the potential that AI technology has to improve our world, from helping us find answers to the biggest mysteries of the universe to finding cures for diseases that kill millions each year.

While answering a question from Paul about whether he thought there was other life out there, Keating poignantly said that humans are the only life form we know for certain exists and that we should “preserve the candle of consciousness” at all costs. Why go to Mars, he wondered, when there are so many incredible things to be learned and done here on our own planet – and that AI can help us discover.

He sees AI as a facilitator of human invention, not a tool to snuff it out.

In Celebration of Move 78

Paul’s talk was called “The Move 37 Moment for Knowledge Workers”. His point was that AI has progressed to the point where it is as good as – or better than – humans at many things that we do for work and fun. It was a call to action for people to educate themselves on AI’s capabilities so when they experience their own Move 37 moment, they will be prepared to do something that only a human being can do – to nurture that candle of consciousness.

I keep coming back to that image of Lee Sedol standing up from the table. He didn’t storm out in anger or collapse in defeat. He simply walked away – stunned, human, aware that something profound had just happened.

That’s the part we rarely talk about. Not the brilliance of the move, but the silence that followed it. The small, unmistakable moment when someone who had mastered his craft realized mastery itself was being redefined.

In the years since, AI has made millions of its own Move 37s. It writes, paints, reasons, and strategizes in ways that can astonish even the people who built it. And yet, none of those moves carry the weight of that quiet walk from the table. Machines can generate ideas. But only we can feel the loss of our old ones.

Maybe that’s what keeps the candle of consciousness burning – the flicker of awareness that we’re no longer alone in our intelligence, but still singular in our capacity to wonder, to grieve, to adapt.

Sedol did come back. He studied the board, changed his strategy, and won the next match. Not because he learned to play like a machine, but because he remembered what it means to be human in the face of one.

That’s the work in front of all of us now.

To step away when we need to.

To feel what the moment demands.

And then, to return – to the table, to the conversation, to defining the future – and create our own Move 78.