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Chess has always been a game. For other intellectual activities, at least for several people, a big part of the pleasure in engaging in such activities is the sense of contributing something that matters to a collective effort. Strip that away (e.g., because a machine can do the same thing more efficiently) and you effectively make such activities pointless for those people.

by ForHackernews13 hours ago|

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That's sad for those people but most humans are not lucky enough to find that meaning in their work. Most people work hard pointless jobs and find meaning elsewhere, in their family, their friends, their faith.

Now maybe AI can do some of those hard pointless jobs for us.

by lf8812 hours ago|

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Sure. I am aware of this. It's sad that the first "victims" of AI could be people working in some of the most rewarding professions (art, music, math research...). As far as labor is of concern, however, most people will likely suffer more from social unrest and rampant inequality due to widespread unemployment among white-collar workers. And I am also worried by the potential effects of long-term cognitive offloading.

It would be great if AI could take away the soul-crushing part of the work and leave only the rewarding part. It's not heading that way.

by Light_Hope22 hours ago|

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Just as AI chess performance failed to render human chess playing pointless, it's unlikely that AI will make human thought pointless. Unfortunately, not being pointless doesn't create economic leverage or incentive, and currently a significant portion of humans depend on being the best chess solvers to sustain themselves. If Deep Blue rendered large portions of human thought economically meaningless, we might look at it a little differently.

by boorang16 hours ago|

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this ticks at something that maybe is obvious in retrospect- this is all about economics. the arguments about "using AI doesn't make you an artist", etc. are about being able to charge money for your art i think. maybe obvious to some, but it needs to be explicitly spelled out i think. i was stuck on "i dunno, if i use an AI assistant to run blender i'm still being creative", but is the real argument "you should not be able to charge money to use blender with an AI assistant- you are displacing existing blender artists economically"?

i'm in semi-forced-retirement as an older software engineer in this labor market, so i might be less sensitive to the implicit economic arguments.

by georgestrakhov7 hours ago|

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Exactly this. Everything is a sport / art / status game. And I'm here for it! Lila all the way through. Finite and infinite games. The trick is (like it has always been) to not take the game or ourselves too seriously, while still engaging in the game wholeheartedly.

by pretendscholar5 hours ago|

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c) degrade the previous prestige form of chess (classical with adjournments) and maybe improve the opening repertoire of gms

by vouaobrasil22 hours ago|

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It didn't destroy chess but it did make it a little irritating in some ways. More mechanical. Some chess players have bemoaned the level to which grandmasters and other highly-ranked players just endlessly study opening-book theory and I think computers made that worse. Bobby Fischer also agreed and that's why he invented Fischer random chess.

I do think it also took some of the magic away from chess, and Lee Sedol has said something similar about go.

So did it destroy it? No. And maybe you could make the argument that it got more exciting in some ways, but I think it sort of degenerated into a spectacle and it's just not as interesting as it used to be, and I think computers have played a role in that.

by gizajob22 hours ago|

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At the same time though, Magnus is Magnus because he’ll crush you in any endgame.

I’d posit that more people are playing more and learning chess than ever before, thanks to networking and AI assistance. And computers have only beaten us at computer chess. Human chess is always an experience for learning about the other person, or flipping the board and walking off in a huff.

I don’t know so much about Go and it’s not surprising that Lee Sedol became pretty demoralised, but the generation coming after him alongside computers are going to see new possibilities that had gone unnoticed in purely-human Go, extending the game for everyone.

by vouaobrasil9 hours ago|

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I don't think more people playing is necessarily a good thing for the enjoyment of the game in the long run, just like more people with phones is not necessarily a good thing for enjoying photography if it means photography is primarily used as fuel for social media algorithms.

Of course Magnus would crush be, but the existence of the best player in the world doesn't have any impact on the health of the game community as a whole. Magnus would crush me even if he had never used a computer, but in the latter case I think his games against other players would be more interesting as well.

by gizajob9 hours ago|

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I’m not really sure what kind of world you’re looking for where chess is played with the maximum of purity and artistry by only the right kind of people.

by lg568915 hours ago|

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AI vs AI chess, played from the standard opening position, is pointless--it's always a draw. Human vs human chess is doing well but AI is banned from it.

The chess-math analogy would imply AI could bring us into a golden era of math competitions for humans. But I don't think it says anything good about prospects for humans in research math.

by drnick116 hours ago|

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No, just like cars haven't made walking pointless.