In April, at the end of the American college basketball season, Coach Tara VanDerveer retired. She won a record 1,216 games as a college head coach, most of them at Stanford University, where she had coached the women’s team since 1985.
Here is a promise. If you study Coach VanDerveer’s career, you will deepen your understanding of what it means to be smart in the age of AI. One of her secrets was lateral thinking. Now here’s a prediction. In the age of AI, how we define human intelligence will change. Lateral thinking will be the new smarts.
Who is smarter, a master chess player or a millionaire professional poker player? Most of us would say the chess master. The recent greats, from Garry Kasparov to Magnus Carlsen, likely possess IQs in the 99.9th percentile. Poker, by contrast, rewards luck and lying (i.e., the ability to bluff) as much as deep analysis.
Yet, in which game did AI first triumph? It was chess, dramatically proven in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat the world’s best chess player, Garry Kasparov. Then in 2015, the story repeated. The world’s best Go player, Fan Hui, was beaten by AlphaGo, a program developed by London’s DeepMind, in five straight games. (DeepMind was owned by Google.)
According to AI speaker Neil Sahota, AI tools like PioSolver and Simple Postflop, can help human poker players. Chess is deterministic. There is always the best next move, and AI finds it faster than any player can.
Poker, human and messy, resembles the business and investment worlds more than chess. It is not deterministic. Success depends on a lot of luck. One bets on imperfect information: cards held by the other players; cards remaining in the deck, and opponent bluffing skills. Poker players must have grit to keep betting even on bad luck streaks. They must have endurance to sit and play for three-hour sessions. It helps to have a range of skills, from math to history to psychology. The best poker players are wide-ranging, lateral thinkers.
Back to Coach VanDerveer. I once interviewed her for a book I was writing. She told me: “In sports you don’t have to have a patent for ideas. You can steal stuff. So I became really good thief. I go around and watch football practice. I watch water polo practice. I get ideas, I talk to coaches, I try to learn how to do my job better.”
After VanDerveer arrived at Stanford in 1985, she looked up the head athletics coach. He suggested that VanDerveer bring her basketball team down to the track, so they could work on their foot speed and vertical jumps by doing things like toe raises, lunges, short sprints, and barefoot training in the grass. It worked. “We had kids improve their vertical jump eight inches in three months,” VanDerveer said. “That was incredible to me.”
How many basketball coaches, steeped in basketball tradition, would have sought out another sport’s coach for improvement? VanDerveer did.
In sum: Embrace AI to the max. AI is surely our generation’s technology superpower. But don’t let AI stop you from finding other ways of getting smarter. Look for winning ideas you can adapt from other fields—that’s lateral thinking.
