My friend was only partly sold. What was the equivalent now, for her?
That’s when I remembered a third Go champion who played AlphaGo but wasn’t included in the documentary. This is Ke Jie. In 2017, months after Lee’s match, he was 19 years old and the best player in the world, having beaten Lee to three straight championships. Like Fan and Lee, Ke also lost to AlphaGo, after which AlphaGo no longer had a human to beat.
But Ke’s reaction is, I think, the most interesting and also the most hopeful. Pre-AlphaGo, Ke, a teenager with world-class abilities, was also a world-class brat, famous for challenging Go’s culture of humility. When Ke challenged Lee to a match, for example, he posted a video of himself as a boxer punching Lee and ostentatiously bragging and taunting his opponents.
However, after Ke’s defeat at the hands of the DeepMind AI, he underwent a noticeable change. In his television appearances since then, he has adopted a stance of wry, jovial and humble, becoming a much-loved crowd favorite along the way. Again, looking for lessons, I can’t help noticing Ke’s extreme youth, 15 years younger than Lee, 16 years younger than Fan, and wonder if he had been less invested in a particular way of valuing and understanding himself. Perhaps, therefore, he was better able to change the way he related to the world on a fundamental level.
Also important to this story is that unlike Fan, whose turn to temporary AI research consultant could be seen as a demotion from the European Go champion, Ke’s turn allowed him to stay on top of the game.
The pivot of However, “world’s best player in humanity’s most logically complex game” to “comedian” is pretty dramatic, and I think the magnitude of that change reflects the depth of changes to come. And if Ke Jie has to do that, what does that mean for the rest of us? My hunch is that economic concerns will dominate for years to come, but assuming that is resolved, where will status resurface if the basic skills of art, design, science, law, medicine, and engineering are sucked into GPT-7?
Webb himself thought that the human niche would become something closer to judgment, “where the point is that it’s a human being who makes the decision.” For a judge, a politician or a newspaper editor, for example, “we know we can make the AI do it for us, we can ask it to tell us what to do, but we prefer a human being to do it. ”
Once again, the cutting edge of Go and chess, “solved” by AI two decades earlier, offer us tea leaves to guess if we choose to read them. In these worlds, Ke Jie isn’t the only high-status genius to spin like he did; Magnus Carlsen, the world’s greatest chess player, has become known in recent years for his “interesting” play in response to AI creating an indisputable hierarchy of opening moves. Even more heretical, players with much lower skill levels are starting to surpass the old masters in popularity: the nice and attractive Botez sisters are second most played chess players while they have ELO ratings that are not close to the best in the world. And Zhan Ying, a Chinese Go player with a considerably lower skill level than Ke Jie, recently dethroned him, briefly, as the world’s most-watched Go player.
If this trend is any indication, we should expect to see soft skills (humor, presence, personality) become the game. In this sense, it is possible that we are already halfway there without realizing it: perhaps the future belongs to the influencer.