I saw this coming even before Alpha Go won 4/5 games vs Lee Sedol. Imagine if you worked all your life to be the best software developer in the world and won all official competitive tournaments with spectators in the field. Then along comes some newfangled ML that not only writes programs faster than you, but the programs are qualitatively orders of magnitude better organized and using algorithms you could only begin to imagine. If your interest is in what's the best, you may as well stop and switch to ML research.
The comparison to sports isn't 1:1 as sports is about physical biological limits vs games which are more about the thought processes. Also human+AlphaZero < AlphaZero so why would I spectate a human+machine vs human+machine match?
Much later when it's commonplace for machines to be better than people at many things, things will change back, like we're amazed to watch people recite digits or make numerical computations.
Kind of apples to oranges. Many people have tried to build models to write code. And while some have managed to make some progress, compared to us, the structures and algorithms are crap at best. Even though those NN's are RNN's, you can look at GAN's for an analogy: they can make some really photo-realistic images but there is a problem - the fact that you can't give them well defined rules: "cats have 4 legs and 1 tail", "people most commonly have two eyes with matching eye colour" or "cars are symmetrical". Until there's a solution to that, I doubt we'll see a machine writing good code. But to be fair, I'd be incredibly excited to see one - that opens up so many doors - we could start finding cures for incurable deseases and cures for deseases we know very little about, accelerate every aspect of our lives - space exploration, climate change, aging, transportation and so on. If anything, seeing a model that writes code a thousand times better than I ever would, will not discourage me from writing code. Far from it, I would do anything I'm physically and mentally capable of to be a part of it.
As for when it's commonplace - yes and no. It's like knowing 60 digits of pi - it works as a party trick but other than that I don't see any real value.
But again - I think we are really far away from that and I consider those thoughts to be my personal speculations at best. Only time will tell.
Machines don't need these rules. Cars don't need to be symmetrical any more than an antenna or other structure[0]. This is exactly analogous to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero played strange bad-looking moves.
The comparison to sports isn't 1:1 as sports is about physical biological limits vs games which are more about the thought processes. Also human+AlphaZero < AlphaZero so why would I spectate a human+machine vs human+machine match?
Much later when it's commonplace for machines to be better than people at many things, things will change back, like we're amazed to watch people recite digits or make numerical computations.