In 1985, twenty-two-year-old Garry Kasparov sat down against Anatoly Karpov in Game 24 of their rematch in Moscow needing just a draw to clinch the title. With no chess engines around, Kasparov’s team of grandmaster seconds pored over physical boards, tobacco smoke filling late-night hotel rooms as they hunted for opening novelties. Kasparov spent nearly half his clock on the Sicilian Najdorf alone—today, grandmasters blitz through those same first thirty moves in seconds, having memorized lines that computers already solved. That shift—from deep, uncertain middlegame fights to pre-computed endgame precision—has spread beyond chess. In modern warfare, planners no longer risk massive frontline invasions like the Schlieffen Plan or Eisenhower’s Normandy build-up; they target rubble or carry out token strikes, reciting scripts toward foreordained outcomes. Brutal trench-style grinding still happens in eastern Ukraine, but public focus has moved to narrow precision actions—JSOC raids, drone strikes—treating opening campaigns as obsolete. Tech visionaries mirror this endgame obsession. On a podcast, Elon Musk brushed past questions about how to keep GPUs running in orbit or build a new chip fab, instead leaping straight to harvesting solar power from space or launching AI satellites via lunar mass drivers. He treats every challenge as a bottleneck to solve on the path to a pre-agreed terminal point: a future where AI consumes virtually all civilization’s energy. It’s an approach that works for rockets and electric cars—but it leaves out the messy, unforeseen complexities that lie between move one and checkmate.