> It's like chess. Humans are better for now, they won't be forever
This is not an obviously true statement. There needs to be proof that there are no limiting factors that are computationally impossible to overcome. It's like watching a growing child, grow from 3 feet to 4 feet, and then saying "soon, this child will be the tallest person alive."
With these "AGI by 2027" claims, it's not enough to say that the child will be the tallest person alive. They are saying the child will be the tallest structure on the planet.
The time where humans + computers in chess were better than just computers was not a long time. That era ended well over a decade ago. Might have been true for only 3-5 years.
Unrelated to the broader discussion, but that's an artifact of the time control. Humans add nothing to Stockfish in a 90+30 game, but correspondence chess, for instance, is played with modern engines and still has competitive interest.
The pain of that 90% work is how you get libraries and framework. Imagine having many different implementation of sorting algorithms inside your codebase.
I think he knows that. There was a period from the early 1950s (when people first started writing chess-playing software) to 1997 when humans were better at chess than computers were, and I think he is saying that we are still in the analogous period for the skill of programming.
But he should've know that people would jump at the opportunity to contradict him and should've written his comment so as not to admit such an easily-contradictable interpretation.
The phrasing was perhaps a bit odd. For a while, humans were better at Chess, until they weren't. OP is hypothesizing it will be a similar situation for programming. To boot, it was hard to believe for a long time that computers would ever be better than a humans at chess.
