VBlog

Thesis: it’s the animal within us that makes us human. Recent advancements in AI give us power — but it’s doesn’t replace what makes us us

Machines conquered Chess.. but not Humans

It’s 1997. Garry Kasparov (the current world champion and arguably the greatest of all time 🐐) is shocked by his opponent. Not by its moves, but the fact that it’s able to play with uncanny consistency and resilience. There are no signs of tiredness, no “mind-games”, just pure chess. Gary not only lost the match but also the hope for the future of chess. He and many others imagined that the game of chess has been conquered by machines. And that it will never be the same again.

Fast forward to 2025, a nineteen year old boy from India, named D. Gukesh, just won the world championship. Chess did not die in 1997. Twenty eight years later, it’s one of the most popular games in the world. Machines now play chess far better than humans, and you don’t need a room size computer to beat the best human chess player in the world.

No chess story in 2025 is complete without mentioning the modern GOAT, the one and only, Magnus Carlsen. The rise of Magnus to the top of chess is nothing short of extraordinary. Coming from Norway (a country known for cold weather not Chess!) it was surprising how Magnus rose to the top so quickly. At 35 years old, there is hardly anyone who comes close to beating him.

“Magnus has an incredible innate sense. … The majority of ideas occur to him absolutely naturally. He’s also very flexible, he knows all the structures and he can play almost any position.”

-Vishy Anand

Magnus can play any chess opening; making it harder for opponents to prepare against him. He especially does well in shorter time controls where intuition and game understanding plays a larger role. While chess engines and online chess have made the game accessible to a larger audience, at the top level, access to AI does not make the difference. It’s the coaches, hard work and ultimately some innate talent that seems to win. Magnus may not be the best player when playing against the machines, but he does incredibly well when playing against other humans.

So, what makes us Human?

It’s the raw animal ability to experience and learn from it. Or as Buddhism teaches, the ability to suffer.

You can only truly empathize with someone if you have gone through the suffering yourself. A simple example: would you learn how to swim from a coach who doesn’t know how to swim? Will AI be able to impart swim lessons as effectively as a human? Each time a human learns to swim, they have to suffer a little.

Whether it’s creativity, empathy, or any other quality that makes us human – they are all backed by experience. What AI has learnt from is the language, not experience. I recently read Siddhartha by Hermen Hesse. And there this point in the book where Siddhartha justifies to his friend on why does he disagree with Buddha:

Siddhartha is talking about his disagreement on feeling of love between himself and Buddha.

My point – LLMs have mastered our words and outplayed our thinking brain. But what we feel will always escape language.

Hence, it’s not what AI is able to do but rather what it’s making us do that is more concerning. I think of LLMs as just another tool that has made humans more powerful. But underneath, the technology is diluting what we feel by hijacking our mind while we eat, sleep, love, travel, talk, poop. And now with LLMs, it has hijacked our creative process. 

If we can preserve this that is core to being human, AI can never replace us. A good Hindi idiom that holds true for monkeys and now for AI:

“Bandar (AI) Kya Jaane Adrak ka Swaad” 🐒😋

Maybe that’s the next question — not what AI can do, but what it’s slowly untraining in us. I’ll explore that in Part II.