The human renaissance of 2026

Intro

This is just a chess adjacent post, as it poses a question regarding our future as people in a world increasingly "disrupted" by AI. And the answer might be good? Inspired by the AI revolution in chess.

What is intelligence?

People have been trying - maybe not as hard as they should have - to give an objective definition to intelligence. As soon as a machine was getting close to that definition, people would change it. Basically, everyone agreed on one thing only about intelligence: if it's not human, it's not intelligence. After all, this allowed us to feel moral while enslaving and killing off everything else since forever, why stop now?

Of course, the definition itself is meaningless. It's what the capability endows that matters. Alan Turing was closest to trying to objectively define intelligence, and his idea was that if you can't distinguish something from someone that you believe is intelligent, then that something is intelligent. Kind of like porn. If it quacks like a duck... it must be some IT reference.

Anyway, in that sense we've been surrounded by intelligence for a long time already. Search engines are AI and have always been. Remember the before times, when search engines were not there? There had to be a person knowing everything - usually your wife - that you would ask not for the information, but for where to look for it. They served as information indexes. Not after Google came about. I kid you not, but people could function without going online to search for something every five minutes. The brain rot is real!

The big chess disillusionment

I had to get to chess eventually. So at one time or another, computers became smart enough to play chess better than people and then better than the best of people. The moment of doom for chess is considered when Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue. Of course, they all framed it as machine vs human, not a self taught hard working brilliant man against an American corporation, but I digress...

Thing is, chess did not die. People started saying (yes, Gotham is derivative) that chess has been solved even before computers came along, but chess was not solved. Instead, it blew up! Computers and the Internet gave those people immediate opportunity to test their ideas. Content in text and video form enabled immediate and thorough learning. Why would that happen if chess were solved?

The insight

At this moment we are standing on a precipice. For some it's more visible than for others and, even with a lot of ignorance fueled panic, the change is clearly real. Your job may be gone in just a few months. Poof! No need for your skills. Who even are you, if you're not your job? They drilled that into you since you were born! Your child might get out of school and find absolutely no need for any of their training. And later, when all the juniors that were replaced by machines fail to generate a layer of seniors that can understand how to work with machines from a human perspective, we will all decry our shortsightedness.

But what if this means the story of chess will repeat itself? Yeah, other than a few starving coaches, no one needs chess to survive so that's a bummer, but look at how that turned out for the game. Stockfish is there to tell you where you went wrong, but the beauty of chess is what drives people to study it. Some do it for fun, some are addicted to bullet, but the vast majority of millions of chess players are playing other people, comparing themselves not with the machine gods, but with their peers.

The level of creativity in chess has skyrocketed, with every single person in the world being able to come with new ideas and immediately refine and test them. People who deride you for coming up with lines that Stockfish doesn't agree with are actually considered trolls nowadays. We know computers are better... and we don't care. After a short period of denial we accepted it and we moved on to have our fun.

The hope

So, I am asking myself: is it possible that this is what's in store for us? Not a Butlerian Jihad that will enslave humanity for millennia under a feudal system designed to keep everybody in the muck, but a creative renaissance of unimaginable proportions? A world where we know machines can outthink us, so we will never become accountants, lawyers, pencil pushers, middle management, factory workers, farm hands and instead focus on human values and interaction?

Perhaps that's just a dream, but dreams are important. Remember than in the '70s we had cyberpunk, a sci-fi genre that feels closer to us now, but ultimately was shown to be overly optimistic. Corporations that function at peak efficiency, forcing people to be the best they can be? When have you ever seen a large enough group of people be efficient in anything? When was the last time when a corporation or government valued performance over status quo? Cyberpunk was a dream, too, regardless of how dark.

What if machines will really take over the tedium and, instead of enslaving us in a world without time to breathe, where it takes all the running you can do just to keep in place, they free us from pretention, allow us to understand our minor importance, and give us permission to finally be human?