They might have, because everyone did. I am not aware of any predictions before Deep Blue that computer chess would make it far more popular, I don’t recall chess skyrocketing in popularity monotonically ever since Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov (as opposed to the initial surge of interest & hype—no such thing as bad publicity—followed by poking along for a decade and only rising relatively recently due to totally exogenous shocks from the rise of streaming and flukes like The Queen’s Gambit); and indeed, this is not what has happened with most games once agents became superhuman. Did Arimaa enjoy a spike? Did backgammon after TD-Gammon? How about checkers since 1994? How much do FPSes enjoy spikes in popularity after the first superhuman aimbots are deployed? How much do MMORPGs benefit from botting? Is SC2 or DotA2 enjoying a renaissance now, or is their continued plummet in popularity simply because they haven’t been botted hard enough? You point to chess, but what about shogi, which also was beaten by AlphaZero? How about Stratego? I notice that hobbyists are approaching superhuman in Rocket League, but somehow none of the Rocket League people seem happy about the progress… How are any of them doing? Just how many different games are you cherrypicking chess out of...?
It is also not a great idea to appeal to games persisting when the basic problem is one of economics, technology, and power. Games are untethered from the real world; if an AI is superhuman at chess, that ultimately is meaningless outside chess. (People like to dismiss such things as ‘just games’ or ‘just closed worlds’; which is a fair criticism, but then you need to also apply it to the arguments for why you should expect things like the economy to go the same way: why is, say, lawyering going to go the same way as chess streaming? Are we going to suddenly see millions of people flocking to Twitch to watch Nakamura spin in his chair cracking wise as he plays ‘bullet briefs’ with a superhuman law-agent? How many existing lawyers, or total lawyers, does streaming law support?)
They might have, because everyone did. I am not aware of any predictions before Deep Blue that computer chess would make it far more popular, I don’t recall chess skyrocketing in popularity monotonically ever since Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov (as opposed to the initial surge of interest & hype—no such thing as bad publicity—followed by poking along for a decade and only rising relatively recently due to totally exogenous shocks from the rise of streaming and flukes like The Queen’s Gambit); and indeed, this is not what has happened with most games once agents became superhuman. Did Arimaa enjoy a spike? Did backgammon after TD-Gammon? How about checkers since 1994? How much do FPSes enjoy spikes in popularity after the first superhuman aimbots are deployed? How much do MMORPGs benefit from botting? Is SC2 or DotA2 enjoying a renaissance now, or is their continued plummet in popularity simply because they haven’t been botted hard enough? You point to chess, but what about shogi, which also was beaten by AlphaZero? How about Stratego? I notice that hobbyists are approaching superhuman in Rocket League, but somehow none of the Rocket League people seem happy about the progress… How are any of them doing? Just how many different games are you cherrypicking chess out of...?
It is also not a great idea to appeal to games persisting when the basic problem is one of economics, technology, and power. Games are untethered from the real world; if an AI is superhuman at chess, that ultimately is meaningless outside chess. (People like to dismiss such things as ‘just games’ or ‘just closed worlds’; which is a fair criticism, but then you need to also apply it to the arguments for why you should expect things like the economy to go the same way: why is, say, lawyering going to go the same way as chess streaming? Are we going to suddenly see millions of people flocking to Twitch to watch Nakamura spin in his chair cracking wise as he plays ‘bullet briefs’ with a superhuman law-agent? How many existing lawyers, or total lawyers, does streaming law support?)