I’ve been thinking about how chess grandmasters are consistently beaten by AI. For decades, artificial intelligence has been good enough to defeat the best human players. This fact keeps recurring in my mind because it’s been bothering me. We accept this reality—put the best GM against the best AI algorithm and the AI wins every time. That’s fine for chess, right? It’s just a game. People still play it, and competitions remain human versus human. This is well understood.
What I keep thinking about is: what happens when this same condition applies not to chess, but to programming? Or accounting? Or any high-value thinking task that functions in the real economy—jobs people earn their living from?
Take that same chess scenario and apply it to programming or accounting. What happens when these high-value economic skills are clearly and demonstrably better performed by automated algorithmic systems? What happens when our economy begins adapting to these automated systems while everyone believes we can continue normally, as we did with chess?
I firmly believe we’re at that point right now. In a capitalist system, it’s only a matter of time—maybe six months to a year—before companies adapt to and adopt this automated technology. They’ll no longer feel obligated to hire people for an inferior product when AI can do it better, just as AI consistently beats the best chess players in history. Except now we’re talking about high-value tasks that people are paid to perform in our economy.
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