AI, ageing and brain-work productivity: Technological change in professional Japanese chess

Using Japanese professional chess (Shogi) players’ records in the setting where various external factors are controlled in deterministic and finite games, this paper examines how and the extent to which the emergence of technological changes influences the ageing and innate ability of players’ winning probability. We gathered games of professional Shogi players from 1968 to 2019, which we divided into three periods: 1968–1989, 1990–2012 (the diffusion of as information and communications technology (ICT)) and 2013–2019 (artificial intelligence (AI)). We found (1) diffusion of AI reduces the impact of innate ability in players performance. Consequently, the performance gap among same-age players has narrowed; (2) in all the periods, players’ winning rates declined consistently from 20 years and as they get older; (3) AI accelerated the ageing decline of the probability of winning, which increased the performance gap among different aged players; (4) the effects of AI on the ageing decline and the probability of winning are observed for high innate skill players but not for low innate skill ones. The findings are specific to Shogi as a kind of board games although it is valuable to examine the extent to which the findings hold for other labor market.