Obviously we all play games for different reasons, and Lee's experience of his game is one that few people in human history have had. That said, this reaction really surprises me, and I think it's easy to read too much into this. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/27/go-game-master-quits-saying-machines-cannot-be-defeated

This is not an inevitability - it is a very personal reaction of one person, whose relationship with Go is complex and unique. It's sad, but it is not representative of how AI will impact our creative and leisure pursuits generally (except for a rare few playing at extremes).

This month also saw Grimes declare that live music would be obsolete, and then double-down declaring that human art would find it "very hard" to compete with "AGI". This was more bewildering, I think, and glosses over why humans create and play. https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/11/grimes-live-music-obsolete/

Both responses remind me a lot of how Paul Delaroche is said to have reacted to seeing the Daguerrotype, a forerunner of the modern photograph. "From today," he supposedly declared, "Painting is dead."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Delaroche

In the same way that painting was not killed by photography, but did have its function changed forever, we're seeing how technology - not just AI - is affecting our society as it blunders through it. Some parts might get chipped, but the core cannot change.

I think Lee's reaction is understandable, knowing who he is, but it's not a death knell for any of us. But I think both his retirement and Grimes' bizarre terrormongering does point to the important of smaller spaces. The idea of global fame, of global importance, might die out.

Lee plays Go because he loves the game and wants to understand it more, which is something he can continue doing. But the idea of being number one now maybe rings hollow. In Lee's own words, ‘even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated’

Similarly, live music will survive until the last human dies, and AI isn't going to change that. But superstardom is changing. This was considered a risky career goal even pre-Internet, and in the age of billions of content creators and algorithmic filtering, it's even harder.

I really hope we can focus on technology that can brighten and strengthen smaller communities, whether physically local or distributed across the world. AI that foster creative spaces with local-level meaning. AI that is owned and understood by the people that use it.

One of the consequences of this AI boom is the drift towards thinking about AI as a very big thing that only large companies can construct and that you essentially lease and treat like a black box. I don't think this is inevitable. I want to spend the next decade undoing this.