How technology changes the world

Let me be frank, at first -and still a bit- I thought how crazy we are: for decades we are warned by storytellers, be it authors or movie makers, for the dangers of artificial intelligence. Skynet, the synths in Picard ready to swoop in to our Galaxy, or similarly the Reapers in Mass Effect. The latter maybe the most ominous, in which we are in an eternal cycle of destruction between Artificials and us ‘naturals’, won’t go in details for those that suddenly find out why that’s one of the best stories ever actually.

With all the stories going back to at least two centuries, we are still developing exactly that, shows we have absolutely no control over what humanity as a whole actually does. I detest hypocrites, hence my withholding from embracing this new world, at first at least. The world still is a place we all have to survive, it seems like a movie sometimes, but in fact everybody has got to eat and sleep. So to some degree we need to adapt. Especially since I am aiming to continue my career in the office in stead of doing physical labour, it makes sense to learn to work with AI.

Whereas I am mainly on the site for chess, I love the game, the excitement, the surprise to defeat someone who wouldn’t expect to lose, such a great game. Already almost 14 years ago I also found something else fun to do, I started organizing tournaments and specifically ones that were not available at the push of a button.

For 32 chess players I had befriended, I created a 32 players multi round tournament, with help of excel sheets and of course the cooperation of the participants. While the site where we played only offered up to 10 players with 2 games versus each opponents over one round. With most also migrating to chess.com, we banded together here in a club, a couple of years after we all found each other here.

Managing a chess club was actually perfect to combine several hobbies, socializing with friends, creating custom images using Photoshop and nowadays using GIMP3. And the mentioned organizing of events. Which I already did years before by the way, when organizing the seasonal Billiards Competition at the Marina I partially grew up. Playing carom billiards with about a dozen people each Tuesday, yeah my ‘moyenne’ never got over 1.3, for one year I had the job of organizing the thing. That sounds a lot more posh than it was by the way, my parents were simply member in the local water sports club and we had an 8 meter steel boat and went on holiday with it every year for about 3 weeks. I had my own kayak though, good times in hindsight.

I digress though, the admin responsibilities really entertain me and for quite a while I also use it to get relevant experience. Then out of the blue software suddenly does all the image creating for you, it was a flashback to my early work times that suddenly got overtaken by technology as well, resulting in making it easy for anyone.

By now though, I think one still needs the inspiration, one still needs to know how to use the instruments, the tools, it hasn’t changed that much after all. Only the parameters have changed much and probably the results we all can have access to. Embrace the world, or as Paulo Coelho said: “I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.”