Grandmaster Judit Polgár and Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik's Cube, published a joint essay in the British newspaper The Telegraph this week. In their piece, they examine the balance between technological efficiency and the human approach.
"You can't download common sense, because you can't download the experience of failure," the authors state. They also highlight the shared responsibility of researchers, educators, parents, and the toy industry for creating playful learning experiences that foster critical thinking skills in children.
In this course, Grandmaster Elisabeth Pähtz presents the London System, a structured and ambitious approach based on the immediate Bf4, leading to rich and dynamic positions.
The London System is one of the most popular openings at every level of chess but not all Londons are the same. In this course, Grandmaster Elisabeth Pähtz presents the London System, a structured and ambitious approach based on the immediate Bf4, leading to rich and dynamic positions.
Free sample video: Introduction
Free sample video: 5...cxd4 6.exd4 Qb6 sidelines
Its central idea is that the journey toward an answer matters as much as the answer itself. AI can instantly solve a Rubik's Cube, play chess at superhuman strength, or provide the solution to a puzzle. But if we constantly outsource such challenges to AI, we may deprive ourselves—especially children—of the struggle through which curiosity, creativity, intuition, perseverance, and common sense develop.
The authors contrast AI's qualities—speed, knowledge, efficiency, patience, and apparent omniscience—with distinctly human qualities such as emotion, frustration, uncertainty, playfulness, and caring. They describe AI assistants as almost like endlessly patient “adult” family members who always have an answer, but point out that this omniscience can also make them boring and potentially educationally harmful if we allow them to replace our own thinking.
The Rubik's Cube and chess serve as examples. Solving a cube or learning chess involves much more than reaching the correct solution: the process develops spatial reasoning, logical deduction, persistence, foresight, decision-making, and the ability to cope with uncertainty. These experiences help build what the authors call common sense—not merely accumulated knowledge, but an intuitive understanding of how the world works that emerges from experience, including mistakes and failure.
A major theme is play. Children develop intelligence through open-ended play because they constantly ask “What if?” and experiment with possibilities without knowing the correct answer in advance. AI's ability to supply optimal answers can undermine this process: if children are always given the solution, they may become less willing to explore unlikely, inefficient, or unconventional paths.
The article therefore calls for a balance between artificial and human intelligence. Schools, parents, toy companies, and educators should encourage children to use AI as a tool while deliberately protecting opportunities for independent discovery, failure, imagination, and play.
The ultimate distinction the authors draw is: AI supplies data, computation, and answers; humans supply the "why"—ethics, values, purpose, empathy, and caring.
Their conclusion is that efficiency should not become the sole measure of intelligence or education. Children need to retain the "joy of the solve"—the intrinsically rewarding process of figuring things out for themselves—because that inefficient, playful process is one of the foundations of human intelligence and common sense.
Judit Polgár is the strongest female chess player in history. She is a Bye-Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge
Ernő Rubik is an architect and the inventor of the Rubik's Cube. He is a member of Academia Europaea
In this video course, experts (Pelletier, Marin, Müller and Reeh) examine the games of Judit Polgar. Let them show you which openings Polgar chose to play, where her strength in middlegames were, or how she outplayed her opponents in the endgame.
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