I’m not going to say I don’t share deep disquiet about where AI is taking us, setting aside existential risk. One thing that gives me hope, however, is seeing what has happened in chess. The doom mongers might have predicted, with the advent of StockFish and AlphaZero, that human interest in chess would greatly diminish, because, after all, what is the point when the machines are so much better than the world champion ( world champion ELO ~2800, StockFish ELO ~4000) . But this hasn’t happened, chess is thriving and the games of the best human players are widely streamed and analysed and their brilliancies greatly admired. The machines have actually been of great benefit. They have, for instance demonstrated that the classical swashbuckling 19th century style of chess, replete with strategic sacrifices that lead to beautiful attacks, is a valid way to play, because they often play that way themselves. This style of play was for a long period overshadowed by a preference for the more stifling positional chess, the gaining of small advantages. The machines also provide instant feedback in analysis on what is ground truth, whether a particular move is good, bad or neutral. This too has augmented the chess players enjoyment of the game rather than reduced It.
Maybe we can hope that the same situation will apply in other fields of human endeavour.
They might have, because everyone did. I am not aware of any predictions before Deep Blue that computer chess would make it far more popular, I don’t recall chess skyrocketing in popularity monotonically ever since Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov (as opposed to the initial surge of interest & hype—no such thing as bad publicity—followed by poking along for a decade and only rising relatively recently due to totally exogenous shocks from the rise of streaming and flukes like The Queen’s Gambit); and indeed, this is not what has happened with most games once agents became superhuman. Did Arimaa enjoy a spike? Did backgammon after TD-Gammon? How about checkers since 1994? How much do FPSes enjoy spikes in popularity after the first superhuman aimbots are deployed? How much do MMORPGs benefit from botting? Is SC2 or DotA2 enjoying a renaissance now, or is their continued plummet in popularity simply because they haven’t been botted hard enough? You point to chess, but what about shogi, which also was beaten by AlphaZero? How about Stratego? I notice that hobbyists are approaching superhuman in Rocket League, but somehow none of the Rocket League people seem happy about the progress… How are any of them doing? Just how many different games are you cherrypicking chess out of...?
It is also not a great idea to appeal to games persisting when the basic problem is one of economics, technology, and power. Games are untethered from the real world; if an AI is superhuman at chess, that ultimately is meaningless outside chess. (People like to dismiss such things as ‘just games’ or ‘just closed worlds’; which is a fair criticism, but then you need to also apply it to the arguments for why you should expect things like the economy to go the same way: why is, say, lawyering going to go the same way as chess streaming? Are we going to suddenly see millions of people flocking to Twitch to watch Nakamura spin in his chair cracking wise as he plays ‘bullet briefs’ with a superhuman law-agent? How many existing lawyers, or total lawyers, does streaming law support?)
I’m not going to say I don’t share deep disquiet about where AI is taking us, setting aside existential risk. One thing that gives me hope, however, is seeing what has happened in chess. The doom mongers might have predicted, with the advent of StockFish and AlphaZero, that human interest in chess would greatly diminish, because, after all, what is the point when the machines are so much better than the world champion ( world champion ELO ~2800, StockFish ELO ~4000) . But this hasn’t happened, chess is thriving and the games of the best human players are widely streamed and analysed and their brilliancies greatly admired. The machines have actually been of great benefit. They have, for instance demonstrated that the classical swashbuckling 19th century style of chess, replete with strategic sacrifices that lead to beautiful attacks, is a valid way to play, because they often play that way themselves. This style of play was for a long period overshadowed by a preference for the more stifling positional chess, the gaining of small advantages. The machines also provide instant feedback in analysis on what is ground truth, whether a particular move is good, bad or neutral. This too has augmented the chess players enjoyment of the game rather than reduced It.
Maybe we can hope that the same situation will apply in other fields of human endeavour.
They might have, because everyone did. I am not aware of any predictions before Deep Blue that computer chess would make it far more popular, I don’t recall chess skyrocketing in popularity monotonically ever since Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov (as opposed to the initial surge of interest & hype—no such thing as bad publicity—followed by poking along for a decade and only rising relatively recently due to totally exogenous shocks from the rise of streaming and flukes like The Queen’s Gambit); and indeed, this is not what has happened with most games once agents became superhuman. Did Arimaa enjoy a spike? Did backgammon after TD-Gammon? How about checkers since 1994? How much do FPSes enjoy spikes in popularity after the first superhuman aimbots are deployed? How much do MMORPGs benefit from botting? Is SC2 or DotA2 enjoying a renaissance now, or is their continued plummet in popularity simply because they haven’t been botted hard enough? You point to chess, but what about shogi, which also was beaten by AlphaZero? How about Stratego? I notice that hobbyists are approaching superhuman in Rocket League, but somehow none of the Rocket League people seem happy about the progress… How are any of them doing? Just how many different games are you cherrypicking chess out of...?
It is also not a great idea to appeal to games persisting when the basic problem is one of economics, technology, and power. Games are untethered from the real world; if an AI is superhuman at chess, that ultimately is meaningless outside chess. (People like to dismiss such things as ‘just games’ or ‘just closed worlds’; which is a fair criticism, but then you need to also apply it to the arguments for why you should expect things like the economy to go the same way: why is, say, lawyering going to go the same way as chess streaming? Are we going to suddenly see millions of people flocking to Twitch to watch Nakamura spin in his chair cracking wise as he plays ‘bullet briefs’ with a superhuman law-agent? How many existing lawyers, or total lawyers, does streaming law support?)