In 2013, Magnus Carlsen, the youngest grandmaster in history, won the World Chess Championships by playing a completely different game all together.

Instead of relying on memorizing endless positions and running through millions of scenarios, he forced his opponent to get out of his comfort zone of computer analysis and think creatively.

Unfortunately, this was Magnus’ area of specialty, which garnered him the title, “The Mozart of Chess.”

He defended his title in 2014 and 2016.

It’s a brave story for our world where we are inventing artificial intelligence to beat us at our own games. We’ve programmed them to think like machines and take the most calculated responses possible.

Then we started programming them to look at all our work and calculate it based on a number we could measure and manipulate. We have terms like ROI, SEO, Analytics, Quarterly Reports, Unique Visitors, Engagement Rates, Likes, Favourites, Shares, Earnings.

Instead of seeing those metrics as good statistics to have, we became obsessed with them and started thinking in those ways.

We began writing posts on our sites to maximize our SEO in order to get the attention of search algorithms. Then we wonder why our content is so shallow.

We structured our social media posts to gain the maximum amount of visibility and shares, purely to see that number rise. Then we try to tell people to be authentic.

We made business decisions based on nothing but numbers for the past three months, ignoring any other factor that could’ve contributed to a short term gain or loss. Then our business leaders try to tell us to think long-term.

We started teaching in a way that will raise the number on a standardized test in order to appease the machine way of its approach. People get outraged when that number drops. Then we have the audacity to say we care about students.

Our usefulness in society is based on output – best returns on investments of time, money and energy. Then we forget that some people enjoy waking up every day and helping the less fortunate of society without any expectation of returns on their time and investment.

We wonder why we’re miserable when we do something just for the pleasure of doing it.

We’re taking the best and brightest students from the STEM fields and giving them positions where their job is to find ways to incrementally increase numbers instead of allowing them to apply their creativity to greater problems.

Talented artists produce content to market because that’s where they will find “success” (money). Then we complain it all looks and sounds the same… formulaic being the appropriate word.

We’ve created apps for meditation. We’ve taken a discipline that requires us to be completely disconnected and hyper-focused on the present moment and created a way for it to be disrupted by our subconscious knowledge that we are still connected to a device.

We complain our world is becoming more apathetic. People are caring less.

Maybe it’s time we stop thinking like machines and start thinking like humans.