#143 | Humanity at its worst (& best)
Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.
— Osho
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
— Milan Kundera
Our humanity will come to the fore as AI takes over. We are each unique, absurd and unexpected; our limp-limbed soft-skinned “personness” will be our saving grace. The Age of the Individual will supersede the Age of the Machine.
How do we know?
Our obsession with watching people play chess, rather than watching AI play markedly more impressive games, explains our future.
Chess has accompanied humanity for millennia. Its origins trace 1,500 years to an Indian game called Chaturanga. It’s exquisite in pitching intelligence at intelligence. Stefan Zweig’s novella, Chess, represents the game’s joy and cruelty.
Zweig describes a cruise ship in transit from New York to Buenos Aires. On it, Mirko Czentovic, a reclusive idiot savant chess master, a prodigy without further qualities, is challenged to a chess game by a fellow passenger, a businessman. As might be expected, the businessman loses the first game. In a rage, the businessman bets money on a re-match.
The other passengers are captivated. They gather.
Among the crowd is Dr B., an obscure, thin, tall and coldly intellectual character. Dr B. was, until shortly before the cruise, locked up solitarily by the Gestapo. During his confinement, Dr B. stole a book which — to his great disappointment — explained the world’s most famous chess games, move by move.
Nothing to read but chess moves; what torture!
Despite Dr B.’s previous antipathy to the game, he spends years imprisoned and alone obsessing over this book and mentally playing thousands of chess games against himself. In doing so, he develops a remarkable talent.
Dr B. leaves incarceration an unlikely chess genius, despite not having touched a rook for years. And, on the cruise, Czentovic, the prodigy, eventually plays Dr B. in front of a delighted audience. The narrator and the other passengers become entranced by the thrilling game, which reveals insanity.
Zweig’s story demonstrates the obsession that people have with chess. But really, it’s that people are obsessed with other people. And chess is the medium of entertainment.
Chess transfixes us more than ever. Like Zweig’s passengers, half a million tuned in to the most recent FIDE World Championship in April this year.
At this world chess championship, Grand Master Liren defeated GM Nepomniachtchi. However, this is not the highest quality game we can view today. AI can do much better. Liren, for example, has a FIDE rating of 2780. Modern chess engines regularly have FIDE ratings above 3,400, far beyond the best humans.
The advancement of AI in chess is a few years ahead of the rise AI in the real world. There was incremental AI progress for the decades following Turing’s 1951 paper, which theoretically explained a program capable of playing the game. In ’97, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first chess AI to defeat a grandmaster in a match. Today, chess engines are far more powerful than any human.
AI games are, by many measures, more impressive. So, you’d think that AI games might attract the eyeballs. But you’d be wrong. Contrast the FIDE World Championship with The World Chess Software Championship. A review of the latter reads, “Turnout this year [2023] was underwhelming”. A handful of people attended.
So nobody tunes into the AIs playing one another. What’s going on? Do we want to avoid seeing the best games ever played?
More people than ever watch humans play humans because of their humanity. Individuals love individuals! They are clumsy and complex. They have daddy issues. They make mistakes that arrive at genius. They are limited by time and space, constrained, and comprehensible. They boil and stew and storm out. They well up at victory. Then smirk. All these factors, and more, make it entertaining.
With the cost of many things (e.g. software, creativity, design) going to zero, our human-ness will survive as the thing which makes us unique. Our humanity, our watery bodies, these rather peculiar heads with holes in, are increasingly extraordinary.
In 1988, Grandmaster Jan Donner was asked how to prepare for a chess match against a computer. He replied: “I would bring a hammer.” He needn’t worry about the repercussions, because nobody will be watching.
My week in books
The Man Who Cycled The World by Mark Beaumont. I am still reading and loving this book. It’s terrific.
Live well,
H
Great insight. I think one way to draw more attention to AI gameplay is to feature its human creators. Would be interesting to see an AI tournament but featuring the developers who explain the methods etc.