Is Winter Coming?
22nd May 2025
A modern chess engine can easily outplay even the top ranked chess players of the world. It can be useful for practice and even developing new styles of play, but using one in a chess tournament is considered cheating. Such use is considered cheating for the same reason it’s also considered uninteresting: Humans want to watch human feats. To most people these days, a computer playing chess comes off as an extremely computery activity. Everyone understands that chess is a closed – albeit complex – system. Everyone also realizes that a modern computer can make deeper, faster and better predictions than any human is capable of. It isn’t interesting, impressive or entertaining – at least not the same way a 12 year old human chess prodigy is.
A computer that can detect a certain type of disease is of course more interesting and beneficial than a highly competent chess engine, and is going to be accepted by the vast majority of humanity as something good. It’s not cheating, it’s helping. Yet, it’s not much to hang a bunch of hype on: Like with a chess engine, or halfway decent machine translation, it’s simply a computer finally doing one of the many things we’ve always been told they should be able to. A one trick pony, basically just another piece of medical software, more like Word or Excel than a thinking machine.