There is something sad about this comment. It’s as if, even while standing at the peak, he doesn’t grasp what being “at top” actually is.
Would Eliud Kipchoge say the same thing about a motorcycle?
He spent his life honing his skills, becoming better and better at chess until he was the very best. And then, when noone could challenge him, technology emerged that would allow him to continue being challenged and improving his chess game. Something no other human could allow him to do.
Granted, I'm pretty ignorant about competitive chess and how to get better at it. But if my way of looking at it is valid then it probably applies to Lee Se-dol too.
That technology's name? Vladimir Kramnik.
At the time DeepBlue beat Kasparov, Kasparov was honestly still probably better than the computer. He just had a bad match. That was basically demonstrated by his and Kramnik's matches against presumably better computers (than DeepBlue) in the early-to-mid 2000s, which ended in draws. But Kramnik was also a strong competitor to Kasparov in the late 1990s into the 2000s.
It can be viewed as the adaptation of a great competitor -- if a superior adversary emerges, a great competitor finds another way to win.
The rest of the article is worth the read for context. This excerpt alone didn't capture the full spirit of the article.
A bot fine-tuned to dominate Go, or Chess, or whatever, is like a candidate fine-tuned to have perfect appeal to one specific voter. It's no surprise if such a candidate gets that one voter's vote, but it should also be no surprise if such an overtrained candidate performs horribly in the election as a whole.