Competitive chess: really a profession?
On the post "Am I a chess tourist?" by GM Durarbayli
This is the post by GM Durarbayli and this is the discussion of it.
And this is what I think:
Chess as a profession is dying or rather already dead, except for a few countries like India. Our beloved hi-tech have killed the game. We've got around 2000 GMs (my estimation) and even more IMs (WGMs and WIMs alike) who are for some reason very confident in their worth as professionals, although no one's level is even close to the one of a simple phone. "Played like a phone" sounds now a much stronger praise than "played like Karpov", "like Tal", "like Capablanca". Why would someone at all seek to play a GM / analyse games with a GM if he has a perfect 3000+ rated player, readily available 365/24/7, in his hand?
The job that hasn't been finished by Pentiums has been finished by AI, neural networks, cloud servers and multimedia sharing platforms with TBs of chess stuff.
There is some hope in the form of chess960 -- but since the FIDE will rather let the whole of chess pass away than let Fischer chess become mainstream, there is no hope.
What had come some 30 years ago in the form of a miracle / blessing (and seemed so for many further years), eventually turned out to be a sweet delayed-action poison without an antidote. Yes, a poison can be delicious. Now welcome to Skynet, guys! And by the way, this situation has spread, is spreading and will continue to spread exponentially (unless something dramatic is done globally in the urgent and coordinated manner) far beyond chess. Increasingly many occupations get endangered or have already lost attraction from either economic or creative point of view, or both. Chess is just one of the most salient examples. Having read e.g. www.vox.com/the-highlight/23447596/artificial-intelligence-agi-openai-gpt3-existential-risk-human-extinction and learned about ChatGPT, I'm extremely curious about what 2023 has in store for us all. This article is worth reading and re-reading and clicking through the proof links. Humanity has been warned many times but preferred to keep their eyes and mouth shut, not to be distracted from consuming the sweet poison.
Happy New Year!