How would you know what amount of energy the human brain spent in learning to play Go, specifically? In the same time it was doing that, the human brain was also learning to do, and doing, a whole bunch of other things that AlphaGo was never even trained on- from moving limbs and controlling bodily functions to using language and recognising faces and so on. How would you isolate the amount of energy needed for training in Go, specifically?
I mean, in principle, if you had two numbers, "human energy consumption from learning Go" and "AlphaGo energy consumption from learning Go", you could compare them. But in practice there's no way to come up with such numbers, so what's the point of comparing apples and orangutans?
That's not really the point, more that it was originally not an apples to apples comparison and therefore doesn't really tell us anything. I have no doubt that the statement is correct, it's whether or not that statement has any meaning. As another comment pointed out, even if you compared the hours, the computer still uses a few orders of magnitude more energy for a more accurate (although completely theoretical) comparison.
I mean, in principle, if you had two numbers, "human energy consumption from learning Go" and "AlphaGo energy consumption from learning Go", you could compare them. But in practice there's no way to come up with such numbers, so what's the point of comparing apples and orangutans?