Being Kind to Parading Emperors

LessWrong contributor Chris Santos-Lang uses chess as a lens to explore artificial intelligence's impact on human achievement. He observes that while human chess players have improved over decades, the rate of improvement appears to plateau when compared to computer advancement—and modern players routinely reach grandmaster strength by following machine-generated advice. Santos-Lang extends this metaphor through Hans Christian Andersen's 'Emperor's New Clothes,' asking whether AI will eventually reveal that human mastery in fields like writing, research, therapy, and parenting was never as genuine as we believed. Yet his essay concludes not with alarm, but with a call for compassion: acknowledging that the future of AI may be beyond our control, the kindness with which we greet that reckoning remains entirely within it.

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