Twelve-year-old Gary Leschinsky is a nationally-ranked chess player in the U.S. He has a bright future ahead of him — but it may not be in chess.
Why? The reality is that there’s not much future for people in chess anymore. Machines have become so advanced that they will always beat us in the game, however smart we are. In "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World", David Epstein notes that this has been the case since grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s loss to the IBM supercomputer in 1997, and that it’s a sign that perhaps we should be outsourcing tactical tasks to computers. Similarly, translation, spell checking, copyediting, transcription, and other jobs heavily reliant on rote memory have all begun to be outsourced to computers.
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