It has nothing to do with that, scrapers can still scrape new reddit. This is just a hostile action to move visitors to a site that shows more ads.
"> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test."
Is because reddit is threatened enough by "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" the he's locked out of it!