I've heard that many professionals aswell as amateurs, rather than feeling threatened by Alphago's development, they feel excited at the prospect of Alphago discovering new and interesting variations and ways of playing the game. The prospect of computer-discovered joseki isn't far-fetched given Alphago's current level and potential future level.
Go is an eastern game, and although logic and calculation play a significant part, Go can also reflect our human nature and it also embodies and exemplifies interesting philosophical concepts of self-development. I think the attitude of Go players is going to differ greatly from Chess players with regards to Ai. Or perhaps I should say eastern Go players? I don't know. I think if you play it long enough and study hard enough, you eventually change some part of yourself in the process of becoming better at Go. Sometimes you have to pace yourself, defending before attacking, other times jealousy and greed hold you back. Dealing with yourself is a pathway to becoming stronger in Go, and focusing on eliminating a certain bad aspect of your Go, such as jealously invading every opponent territory before making your own, is not just becoming stronger at Go. It can subtly change your outlook on life over time, so that you develop as a human being, not just as a go player. I don't play alot of chess so I can't say for sure, but I don't think chess has nearly the same depth of personal human involvement/development and I don't think chess can reflect aspects of an individual the way Go seems to be able to do.
That may go some way towards explaining why some strong go players don't feel threatened by the prospect of an AI being the strongest player in the world. The human Go players want to learn and get better and they seem to view the AI not as competition, but as a pathway to learn more about Go. It would be interesting to see how strong an Ai can become. How many stones will it be able to give top professionals before it reaches a limit? Will reaching that be where ultimate mastery of the game lies? We don't know. It's like exploring the depths of the sea and the AI being a machine that can potentially dive deeper and see more than we could before, thus giving us more knowledge about this wonderful game that we love.
Also, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Alphago is probably better than almost anybody on these forums and yet we still want to improve and learn, don't we?
I won't lose interest. In-fact, my interest will probably increase if such an AI becomes available commercially, since I could then have a perfect study partner to learn from and analyze games with. It would usher in a completely new and different age of Go, and future pro go players would probably take a leap and become even stronger than the current top players. Many interesting speculations abound. I don't feel sad, I feel excited at what the future might bring
