Conquest vs. Enjoyment
The computer science mindset embraces proofs and conquest, while humanities' approaches seek rich appreciation
At last week’s Silverchair Platform Strategies meeting, a keynote on LLMs and generative AI left one impression — Silicon Valley and their techno-utopians consistently pursues goals of conquest.
Examples pulled from the history of computational success stories brought this point to mind — how Deep Blue “conquered” chess, or another computer “conquered” Go.
These are games, which have rules and artificial structure, so of course computers with enough processing power and programming sophistication could “conquer” them (i.e., solve the possible outcomes fast enough to appear to “play” the games).
But is that the point of playing a game?