Ke Jie was slumped in his seat in May 2017, rubbing his temples, sighing and nervous as he pondered how he’d place his next stone on the nineteen-by-nineteen lined board. The game, called Go, is bewilderingly complex, and Ke Jie, from China, was its global star. “No human on earth could do this better than Ke Jie,” Kai-fu Lee, the author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, writes, “but today he was pitted against a Go player on a level no one had seen before.”

After three gruelling days and on his third and final game, Ke Jie capitulated. But in conceding defeat, he couldn’t shake his opponent’s hand. That’s because his opponent was an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo, developed by a start-up called DeepMind that was acquired by Google. Artificial intelligence had done something once thought impossible: outwitted a champion — and all without feeling, consciousness or an understanding of its own significance.

The match marked a turning point for our relationship with technology and where it’s taking us, Lee argues. For years, AI engineers had regarded a software program that could win at Go as hopelessly complex: the number of possible positions on the board exceeds the number of atoms in the visible universe. The human brain was able to feel out moves and strategies, an intuition that a machine lacked.

• Tags: China, Geoffrey Cain, Issue 15, Kai-Fu Lee