Alexa, Speaking Up

MY FRIEND picked me up for church, and when we arrived we sat and drank coffee in the cafeteria-lounge for a few minutes before the service. He laid his phone on the table, then played with it for a minute. I asked him about his week end trip. He said he had enjoyed it, and was glad he had Siri to help him get there. He pointed at the phone. I mentioned that I had heard a lot about somebody named "Alexa". My friend said that Alexa is another AI computer lady, who does the same job as Siri; gets people where they need to go. We sipped our coffee, relaxing, when suddenly a voice came from his smart phone on the table. It said, roughly; "French pronouns have a gender, but I do not". It was a female voice, Alexa, I thought, telling a blatant lie. My friends and i looked at each other, and I asked "Did that just happen?"..Yes it did, he said. From that point on, my memory becomes a bit of a blur, even though this strange but true incident happened only yesterday. As I vaguely recall, I tried to elicit an explanation from my friend, and I cannot remember what he said,so, it must not have impressed me. It was af if Alexa, or whoever lives in his phone, was listening to our conversation, heard her name mentioned, and decided to respond. The response, lacking any real context, was arbitrary,and non sequitor. The computer program simply did not know precisely how to respond, but only that its name had been mentioned. I do recall my friend saying something like: "they say that everything we say and do might be recorded by our digital devices". At that point, the possibility didn't really seem so fantastic to me. I started thinking about Artificial Intelligences and smart phones. I recalled many years ago, when it was standard knowledge that no computer in the world could beat a good chess player, but that computer people working on chess playing programs for computers, especially at IBM, which was talking aobut its new super computer, "Big Bue". By now I suppsoe that Big Blue is long since retired, perhaps gathering dust in some basement storage area at IBM heqdquartiers, gathering dust, probably less powerful, if reactivated, than your average smart phone. But finally computers got to the level where a good chess playing computer could beat a good human chess player, then, a computer could beat a chess grand master, and then, finally, the point was reached, not surprisignly, at which any old computer could beat the greatest chess players who ever lived, everytime. So I asked his friend whether his cell phone, whether anyone and everyone's cell phone, could beat the world chess champion, every time, now? He said that he didn't think so, didn't think the computer AI revolution was quite that far along...yet...My question now, and I think this question might well be on the minds of many people, is: precisely how far along are "we" now, Atificial Intelligence-wise? Do human beings, of any level of ability, ever beat computers in chess anymore? Will a human being ever beat a computer in chess, or anything else, again? I have a recurring thought of Artificial Intelligence, in the future, designing for themselves human-like bodies which resemble people so closely as to be indistinguishable from real people, multiplying, organizing, taking over the world, then asking themselves: "Is there any reason to keep these soft, squishy, breakable organic humans around any longer"? That's a terrifying thought, because we all know what the answer is.