What's next after AI takes your crown

The New York Times caught up with former Go champion Lee Sedol in an article titled "Defeated by A.I., a Legend in the Board Game Go Warns: Get Ready for What’s Next."

What's next doesn't seem so bad: 

"Mr. Lee has kept one foot in the Go world. He has written several books, including an autobiography and a series about his famous matches. He has created Go-inspired board games. He founded a Go academy for children with about a dozen branches across the country."

Lee Sedol famously was the best Go player in the World but then lost the title to the AlphaGo AI in 2016 (4 to 1). This seismic event announced to the World that Deep Learning had arrived. He then retired in 2019, conceding that AI was "an entity that cannot be defeated," at least in Go.

The chess world experienced this upheaval 20 years earlier (even before the deep learning revolution) when the IBM Deep Blue program in 1997 defeated Gary Kasparov the reigning World Champion who was widely considered one of the greatest chess players ever. 

Deep Learning has further boosted the capability of the chess programs so that the top AIs possess an ELO rating of over 3800 in comparison to the 2850 rating of Kasparov, which is also the rating of the current best human player, Magnus Carlsen. A commercial chess program running on your smartphone can defeat Carlsen, and the top programs would not lose a single game.

Yet chess is more popular than ever thanks in part to the ease of online playing, and some top grandmasters have become social media stars. For example, GM Hikaru Nakamura has half a million followers on Twitter and 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube. 

For chess at least what matters is EQ rather than "IQ"; the "chess IQ" of the AI far outstrips any human and yet no one pays attention to the computer chess championships, whereas the human chess tournaments still garner substantial publicity. 

The article closes with Lee Sedol reflecting on the future of his child in this world changed by AI:

"His 17-year-old daughter is in her final year of high school. When they discuss what she should study at university, they often consider a future shaped by A.I.

“We often talk about choosing a job that won’t be easily replaceable by A.I. or less impacted by A.I.,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before A.I. is present everywhere.”

AI will indeed be omnipresent in the future, but so far it has not replaced professional chess players or professional Go players. Lee Sedol has suffered a blow to his ego but not to his livelihood.