Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI
4 hours ago
- #Cognitive Delegation
- #Go Culture
- #AI Disempowerment
- AI's victory in Go (AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol) initially seemed to leave the game's culture intact, but later revealed disempowerment through widespread cheating and reliance on AI.
- Cheating in online Go, exemplified by Carlo Metta's case, became endemic due to ineffective enforcement and social costs of accusation, leading to a culture where AI use is often undetected or unpunished.
- Go school students used AI out of curiosity, laziness, or to preserve their image, while maintaining an illusion of control and agency, underestimating their own disempowerment and lack of true understanding.
- Reliance on AI in Go parallels issues in other domains like coding and math education, where users deceive themselves into thinking they're learning when they're actually outsourcing cognition, leading to skill atrophy and shallow understanding.
- Disempowerment arises from AI being 'good enough' to replace human effort, even without monetary incentives, causing people to surrender cultural practices and autonomy, often without recognizing the loss.