Competence in the Age of AI
What chess figured out before the rest of us. There's a particular kind of comedy in watching a Magnus Carlsen game with the engine running. The evaluation bar sits along the edge of the screen, white and black, perfectly certain. Carlsen plays a move. The bar twitches. A bright "??" pops up next to it, and somewhere a viewer rated 1400 leans back on his couch and mutters that he wouldn't have done that. The best chess player alive, gently corrected by a man eating chips. I do it too. We all do. Stockfish has made armchair grandmasters of everyone, and the strange part is how normal it feels. You point your phone at a position and it tells you, to a hundredth of a pawn, exactly how wrong everyone is. It wasn't always like this. Rewind thirty years and the world champion was something closer to an oracle. When Kasparov played a move you didn't understand, the assumption ran the other way. You assumed there was something there you couldn't see. His judg...