Why humans stopped playing chess after Deep Blue… oh wait…

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when people thought a computer would never beat a grandmaster human chess player. I know this, because I was one of those people.

‍As a chess player whose skill level is roughly “able to remember how all the pieces move,” the chess master held a place in my imagination somewhere between a general and a wizard, an intellectual titan whose skill and wisdom was almost mythical. There was just no way a computer would be able to cope with the elegant, subtle strategies of the best players.

‍Until they did.

‍When Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, I remember feeling unsettled, like something was wrong with the world. I thought maybe it was a fluke, or bad luck. But then it kept happening.

‍And then a decade passed, and another, and the computers kept getting better, and now here we find ourselves today, where computers playing chess is considered a solved problem, without really any space left to innovate.

‍And the game of chess fades and recedes into memory, as humans have lost all interest in a game that the phone in their pocket can play better than they can.

‍Oh wait.

‍People are still playing chess.

‍In terms of the number of people playing, it may actually be more popular than it’s ever been. Computers may be able to wipe the floor with us as players, but they also enable online play, livestreams, and connection with a far-flung community.

‍People are still playing chess because they enjoy the competition, or the feeling of mastering a skill, or the camaraderie and community of having a game to play with other people who like the same things. After all, it is literally a game. Games can be fun to play! Especially if you know how all the pieces move.

‍Many of us are experiencing a similar uneasy feeling with the advances in generative AI right now. Music, art, writing: these have, until quite recently, been the exclusive work of people. And now computers can spin up all of them almost instantaneously. Maybe the results are hit and miss now, but there’s no reason to assume that will always be the case. It’s inarguable that the whole thing is a giant engine of plagiarism, as the writing or drawing or playing of countless human beings was fed into the machines to pull apart and learn patterns from, but that genie is not going back into the bottle. The engines are trained. The capabilities are out there. Until we can cook up a Butlerian Jihad, they’re going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

And in a world where someone can “write” 200 books a year by pasting prompts into a text box, where our streaming services are clogged with AI “songs” by AI “artists” that are at this point impossible for a regular person to detect, what’s the point of even trying to create anything, now that machines can do it faster?

If you “beat” me at writing by churning out a torrent of slop in the time it takes me to edit three pages of my manuscript, you haven’t really beaten me, any more than you’ve beaten me in chess if you sit across the board from me, obediently moving each piece where a computer chess engine tells you to. You haven’t beaten me. You haven’t even played.

We (humans!) are always going to have stories to tell. We are always going to have feelings that we can only express by playing a certain chord, singing a certain phrase. If we could determine, mathematically, that a computer had somehow written the perfect song and no other song in the future would ever be better, that wouldn’t cause people to stop making music. Because the point of music isn’t to achieve mathematical perfection: it’s to express, to learn, to master, to grow.

I suspect the commercial structures around creativity, the publishers, record labels, film studios and the like, will be replaced or transformed as the barrier to entry for artifacts resembling creative work fades away. At one time, not all that long ago, a manuscript for a book, regardless of its merit, was at least evidence that some human being sat down at their desk and typed out a lot of words. It represented an investment in time. From this point forward, the sheer quantity of words being submitted for publication will increase astronomically. The old systems will buckle under the pressure. There’s just no way they can hold.

But regardless of what system ends up in place to get words from a writer to a reader, songs from a musician to a listener, those connections will happen. They’re fundamental to what makes people people.

And as someone who is about as good a writer as I am a chess player, I’m going to keep writing no matter what the computers do.  

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