When Human Endeavors Turn Inhuman

For an AI to take over a human endeavor, that endeavor must first become less human.

A simple example: Robots began doing assembly-line manufacturing because humans on assembly lines were already working like robots.

It’s this way with mental work too. Take the game of Diplomacy. Diplomacy used to be a board game of intense interpersonal persuasion, theatricality, oration, and psychological showdowns played for long, sweaty hours by human beings in billiard rooms.

But by the time an AI gave it a shot, the game had become almost exclusively a set of game theory calculations rendered online in cryptic abbreviations. When I asked Adam Lerer, a MetaAI programmer who created a Diplomacy-playing AI named Cicero, whether Cicero could pass the Turing test, he joked that modern human players wouldn’t pass the Turing test.

For an AI to play Diplomacy, Diplomacy had to become a less human game.