Chess has been used many times as a metaphor or to establish analogies with other aspects of life. For my part, I find that, amid the artificial intelligence revolution, many aspects of chess can be useful to illustrate realities or to anticipate the future in many areas. And chess, as a symbolic repository of human intellect, has been surpassed many years ago by computing tools, since Deep Blue’s legendary victory over Kasparov in 1997. And, despite all the voices already at that time They anticipated the progressive disinterest in the human aspect of the game since then, the truth is that today chess enjoys extraordinary health. Computers have indeed been integrated into daily practice, being essential today in the training of human players of any level. It is also true that some voices lament that chess today is less spontaneous than in the past, as if the players no longer think for themselves, but rather follow the advice of a computer program. I confess that some of these voices do not allow me to remind me of those who also preach against modern football. In any case, never have there been so many chess players and of a higher level than today, never more tournaments, and never have the big stars been more popular. We could say that, after a time of adaptation, human beings have placed the artificial on one side and we continue to maintain interest in our peers, who are the ones who continue to excite us with all their mistakes: no one pays or would pay interest to a competition between machines.

Living under AI supremacy: Five lessons learned from chess

However, humans have sought ways since the end of the last century to escape this “excessive” influence of machines, trying to ‘re-humanize’ their practice again. The last example is especially interesting. During May, the best players in the world met in Casablanca (Morocco) to practice a new type of tournament. The contestants, at the beginning of the game, opened an envelope in which they were facilitated in the development of a historical game until at a certain point in the game they were invited to continue on their own. The position, in chess terms, had been estimated by artificial intelligence tools as balanced in opportunities. And this is where what I consider very singular and that deserves us to stop occurs: what for a powerful artificial analyst was equal, was not estimated in the same way by the human players. Both contenders often agreed that the game was much easier (or difficult) to play with black or white pieces. We are not talking about the mere criteria of one of the players, but rather they all agreed in the analysis; Then, we are talking about how the human brain understands equality in a different way than the machine. One of the conclusions of the competition is that in the future the human perspective would have to be integrated in some way into the algorithmic analysis tool so that the way of assessing the position would not be objectively exact, but rather subjectively equal. Humanly fair.

Jumping beyond the scope of chess, the same situation can end up being found in many other places. Let’s think about the algorithms that are and will be used to weigh decisions in the field of justice, health, or work (even though, thanks to the new European Artificial Intelligence Law, they will be used only instrumentally). We talk a lot about the need to control biases, but talking about what we consider humanly fair or unfair, it is no longer a question of eliminating human prejudices from the equation, but rather that the definitive result should not necessarily come from an objective truth and mathematically incontestable, but of a HUMAN truth. It is hard but not impossible. Essential, if we do not want artificial intelligence to become a hateful element perceived as disturbing.

By win12

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