AI, Chess, and the Quiet Optimism of Human Adaptability

Annoyingly, after about ten games she beat me.

I still maintain there were mitigating circumstances (wine may have been involved), but the truth is she simply played a better game. And what I remember most about that evening wasn’t the loss, but the moment itself. We both laughed, the board stayed on the table, and it still occasionally comes up in conversation now. We still play from time to time.

Which is interesting when you think about it, because somewhere in the background of all this is a rather inconvenient fact.

Computers have been better at chess than humans for about thirty years.

When IBM Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997 it was widely framed as a turning point, a symbolic moment where human intelligence had been surpassed in one of its most intellectually prestigious arenas. Chess had long been treated as a proxy for strategic thinking itself, a place where calculation, creativity and foresight came together across sixty-four squares.

If you were looking for evidence that machines were beginning to overtake us, this seemed like it.

Yet something weird happened afterwards.

Chess didn’t disappear. It didn’t become pointless now that a machine could defeat any human on the planet. In fact the opposite occurred. The game quietly flourished. Clubs continued, online platforms exploded, and the overall standard of play has improved dramatically in the decades since computers became dominant.

Which raises an obvious question.

If machines are better than us at chess, why do people still play?

The answer is so simple that it is easy to overlook.

People were never playing chess to prove they were the best calculating machine available. They were playing because it is interesting to think against another human being. The tension of the board, the small psychological contests, the satisfaction of spotting an idea before the person sitting opposite you does.

Computers changed the environment around the game, but they didn’t remove the point of it.

Today almost every serious player uses an engine to analyse games and explore positions. The computer has become a remarkable training partner, capable of exposing mistakes and possibilities that earlier generations would never have seen. Players will even challenge the machine directly, fully aware that the contest is wildly unequal. Losing to a computer is not particularly humiliating. It’s more like sparring with a very patient heavyweight.

What players dislike intensely, however, is when a computer pretends to be human.

If someone secretly uses an engine in a tournament the reaction is immediate. It is considered cheating in the purest sense of the word. Not because the machine is too strong, but because it breaks the social contract of the game. The whole experience depended on the belief that you were testing your ideas against another person. Once that disappears, the activity you thought you were engaged in stops existing.

That small detail reveals something important about how humans relate to technology.

We do not optimise our lives purely for efficiency. If we did, we would have stopped doing many things long ago. We didn’t abandon painting when cameras were invented. We didn’t stop running because cars exist. And we certainly didn’t stop playing chess once computers became better at it.

Instead we adapted the relationship.

Technology becomes a tool, a training partner, occasionally a formidable opponent. It raises the level of performance and sometimes removes particular tasks altogether, but it rarely eliminates the underlying human activity. Because the activity itself was never only about the outcome.

It was about the experience of doing it together.

Which is why the current conversation about artificial intelligence often feels slightly misplaced. Yes, AI will change jobs. Some work will disappear, some will be transformed, and entirely new roles will emerge that we can’t yet describe properly. That pattern has repeated throughout every technological shift of the last two centuries.

But humans are extraordinarily good at absorbing new tools without surrendering the parts of life that actually matter to us.

As machines become better at the mechanical aspects of thinking, the human elements of work become more visible rather than less. Judgement, trust, responsibility, creativity, persuasion, collaboration. Those things don’t vanish when technology improves. If anything they become more valuable, because they are the parts machines struggle to replicate in any meaningful sense.

Which brings me back to that game of chess in our kitchen.

Morgan beat me fair and square. A computer could have beaten both of us simultaneously without even trying. Yet the evening itself remains one of those small, oddly memorable moments that still resurfaces in conversation from time to time.

Not because of who played the strongest move.

But because two people were sitting across the board from each other.

And that, it turns out, was the whole point.

Machines may become extraordinarily capable, but capability alone has never been the thing that gives human activity its meaning.

And if chess has taught us anything over the past thirty years, it’s that beating humans at something is not the same as replacing them.

Oh, and don’t underestimate my wife.

P.S. Last caveat! I completely appreciate that chess is a pastime/hobby/sport, but people enjoy their jobs, it gives them meaning. We shouldn’t lose sight of meaning in our lives in rush for optimisation.