Magnus Carlsen, arguably the best human chess player in history, can only dream of beating Stockfish or AlphaZero yet we love seeing him play—we love seeing him win despite knowing that better chess is possible. This is the paradox of AI-driven human creative obsolescence, for lack of a better name.
AI may not be foolproof (yet) but it lives in an always-optimizing state that drives it toward a kind of flawlessness—too alien, too artificial—out of reach for us always-flawed humans. And we happen to like flawed humans do stuff: Carlsen and Kasparov, however brilliant, still make mistakes, yet we rather see them play one another than face AlphaZero. We like to see them play well, and play not-so-well, and fail and recover and fight and earn a
