What Deep Blue did to chess, the new generation of AI engines is going to do to everything.Īlas, not everybody will be able to manage the shift. And although many criticize today’s top-level chess as coldly mechanical compared to the top-level play of previous eras, that criticism loses sight of the simple, startling reality: Artificial Intelligence has expanded human capabilities, pushing back the frontiers between what is possible and what is impossible for a human being to accomplish. They carry those insights with them into the matches, and the result-while still chess-is chess played at a far higher level than was ever possible before. They may not have access to computers as they play competitive matches, but they have what amounts to the same thing: insights, strategies and routines that they could only have gotten from a superhuman machine. The ranks of Magnus Carlsen (the charismatic Norwegian world champion) and his top challengers are best thought of as human-machine hybrids. In some ways, today’s best chess players aren’t strictly human-or rather, their abilities aren’t strictly speaking human. The evaluation of historical players through super-computer analysis finds that the most eminent names from yesteryear’s chess-Lasker, Alekhine, Morphy among them-would not be competitive in top-level play today. Chess, in its current form, has been around for 500 years, but none of the grandmasters of the pre-computer age could possibly compete with any of today’s elite players. One outcome is that the best human chess players today are, objectively, far better at chess than anyone was a generation ago. The resulting training routines are grueling feats of memorization, yes, but they produce human players able to perform at a nearly superhuman level. Mistakes that might have taken hours or days to ferret out in the old days are spotted by the chess engines within seconds. A new generation of talented grandmasters has come of age in the computer era, integrating increasingly sophisticated chess engines tightly into their training. In the 26 years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, elite chess has been revolutionized beyond recognition. And the way high-level chess has changed seems to me as good a road map as any-and a surprisingly hopeful indicator-as to what comes next for all of us. It transformed it in fundamental and very strange ways. The era of superhuman computer chess engines didn’t end high-level chess. This time, it’s everyone.Īll of which left me wondering: can that original Deep Blue moment inform our current vertigo? Only this time, the people directly concerned aren’t just a few dozen grandmasters in the rarified world of top-level chess. We’re living a new, much broader Deep Blue moment, when the basic boundary lines between the outer limits of what machines and humans can do are suddenly in flux. But they can cut through some of the fog, giving us at least a sense of what must change, and what won’t. As we acclimate to this weird new reality, we’re going to need mental models for what comes next. Stepping into this haze to try to hazard a vision of the future is obviously fraught, but the moment of AI vertigo can’t last forever. Historical parallels fail us, leaving us with a queasy sense that whatever might be about to hit us, we’re not ready.

For months now, commentators have been coming face-to-face with the shocking capabilities of a new generation of AI engines like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and are walking away staggered, with a sickened certainty that something big is afoot, but only the haziest notion of where it might be leading.

Today, we’re experiencing a new moment of AI vertigo. Commentators used to thinking of elite-level chess as a sort of irreducibly human area of excellence-the pinnacle of our species’ intellect-were forced into a moment of humility, reconsidering the topography at the outer limits of human and machine intelligence. A machine had beaten the human world chess champion in a competitive match for the first time. It’s easy now to forget how shocking the moment was: just after 4pm on May 11th, 1997, Garry Kasparov resigned in the final game of his highly anticipated chess match against Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer. Garry Kasparov ponders his next move during his match against Deep Blue, 1997.

Deeper blue chess