There have been a couple of brief discussions of this in the Open Thread, but it seems likely to generate more so here's a place for it.
The original paper in Nature about AlphaGo.
Google Asia Pacific blog, where results will be posted. DeepMind's YouTube channel, where the games are being live-streamed.
Discussion on Hacker News after AlphaGo's win of the first game.
Under that hypothesis, shouldn't AI safety have become a "thing" (by which I assume you mean "gain mainstream recognition") back when Deep Blue beat Kasparov?
If you look up mainstream news article written back then, you'll notice that people were indeed concerned. Also, maybe it's a coincidence, but The Matrix movie, which has AI uprising as it's main premise, came out two years later.
The difference is that in 1997 there weren't AI-risk organizations ready to capitalize on these concerns.