Netflix's Queen Of Chess On What Schools Are Getting Wrong About AI

When I sat down with Judit Polgar last week, I expected to talk about chess. What I got was the clearest warning about AI in education I have heard all year.Polgar is the greatest female chess grandmaster in history. The only woman ever to break into the world’s top 10. At 15, the Hungarian prodigy shattered Bobby Fischer's record to become the youngest grandmaster of all time. As a junior, the only player rated above her in their age group was a then-twelve-year-old English boy named Demis Hassabis, the same Demis Hassabis who now runs Google DeepMind and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Her story is the subject of Queen of Chess, the Rory Kennedy documentary that premiered at Sundance in January and entered Netflix's global Top 10 days after its February 6 release.But the reason her story matters to educators right now has very little to do with chess. It has to do with what chess went through three decades ago and what schools are walking into now.Chess was the first profession reshaped by artificial intelligence. From Alan Turing in the 1950s to IBM's Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in 1997, the game was the proving ground for machine intelligence long before anyone outside research labs cared. Polgar was at the height of her career when chess engines moved from curiosities to the dominant force in preparation. She felt the fear, the loss of trust, the recalibration of what human expertise was actually for.She sees the same thing happening now, in classrooms."I'm seeing the same problems, the same fear, the same worry, the same dilemmas, the same insecurity feeling in the society," she told me. "And of course it goes into the classroom. Of course it goes into the mind of the teachers. That, oh my god, what is going to be? I'm going to be replaced. I'm not needed anymore." She paused. "There's very few worse feelings than that."I asked her what it was actually like, going through this herself, thirty years before the rest of us."It was very...