Artificial Time

> In 2013, the world of international chess was shocked by an upset.

Carlsen was the favorite going into the match.

> A young 22 year-old prodigy from Norway, Magnus Carlsen, defeated the reigning world champion, Viswanathan Anand of India, in a series of 10 spellbinding games.

The games had their moments but none are considered classics, and a few were spoiled by the players' nerves.

> The common wisdom has long said that older chess players win on experience over younger, more talented ones.

Not at all the common wisdom in a sport where 7 of the top 10 are under 35.

> But when Carlsen emerged victorious, something different was on display. Carlsen was the first chess world champion to have trained primarily against sophisticated chess AIs available on personal computers as he grew up in the 2000s.

A common myth Carlsen has dispelled many times -- he seldom used chess computers growing up.

This is very hyperbolic, everything in human history is a product of ‘artificial time’. You didn’t invent a hammer, or figure out how to read and write by yourself, or have to build a printing press to distribute messages, those were handed down to you. The digital age definitely accelerates this phenomenon but it is by no means the sole contributor the article makes it seem like it is. Chess champions before Magnus would’ve had books of strategies to learn from as well, thereby benefiting from the time spent of players long gone.

Interesting if somewhat overblown conceptualization.

One note though... particularly calling out the author's paragraphs about how scarce or hard-to-find information is at our fingertips, and how this supposedly extends our informational capability far beyond our ancestors.

In a way, this has some truth to it. But if we look at historical patterns for memorization, rote knowledge, knowledge allocation and storage (even down to the keeping of commonplace books to write down significant information or quotations for later reference)... the relatively unaided human mind is capable of storing and organizing far more than most of us do. As another commenter put it, a lot of these cognitive tools are leaving our own skills highly atrophied or completely undeveloped.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, I like my Kindle, browse social media regularly, etc. But my ability to put coherent structured information down in essays is no greater than my ancestors, and in fact likely much shallower. And I just repurchased and reread a favorite book in hard-copy, and I think my recall of this novel will be far better with the spatial cues of physical pages, than it ever was on an infinite Kindle screen.

And while my Evernote has functionally unlimited pages, I'd be proud to have half the usefulness of Milton's commonplace books, now catalogued in the British Library.

cool story, but

  Every time you use an auto-complete writing tool like TextSpark.ai you are drawing on a vast pool of reading and writing experience equivalent to hundreds if not thousands of years of human life experience. Such tools could allow you to write like no human has ever written before.

maybe im missing something but auto completion is totally different to self-training against a chess ai... one builds your brain muscle, the other could atrophy it

I totally agree. Great analysis and article.