Kasparov

This week I had the fortune of seeing Garry Kasparov give a speech on “The Nexus of Human Creativity and Machine Intelligence.” Garry Kasparov, for those of you that don’t know, is a former World Chess Champion born in the Soviet Union and widely considered to be one of the top 2 chess players of all time. His remarkable rise to the top of the chess world coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union, his series of match-ups against Anatoly Karpov, the previous World Champion, symbolized the struggle of the old Soviet guard against the younger, more western thinking generation. Kasparov has been an outspoken critic of Putin and today lives in the United States. His chess journey also crossed into the mainstream news cycle via his 1996 and 1997 matches against IBM’s DeepBlue, the first computer capable of beating a chess player of his caliber - a monumental step in the trajectory of machine intelligence. His star power, even today, was evident - I was luckily enough to see him hanging out in a VIP area before his speech, and it was obvious even from afar, the extent to which the crowd that followed him hung on his every word. A Candidate Master friend of minde was following him from afar, taking countless pictures and videos, visibly giddy about seeing the man he called his “hero.”

As Kasparov pointed out, the chess app I have on my phone today would squash DeepBlue like an ant beneath its boot. The progress in Machine Intelligence made in the almost 30 years since DeepBlue is remarkable. For this reason, I was interested to hear what he had to say. He was unrelentingly positive about the role man had to play in this struggle between man and machine. He brushed aside a question about jobs being lost to AI by highlighting how many new jobs had already been created because of technological progress. He highlighted a 1998 chess event that pitted pairs of chess players and machines against other chess players using machines - pointing out that those that thrived were not those that had access to the strongest machines, but those that knew how to use them. This was my big takeaway from his speech, this idea that even in a world in which AI can do 95% of our work, that remaining 5% becomes all the more important. The humans that can most effectively leverage the tools, passing off the necessary work, knowing when to trust, when to double check, how to calibrate, will be best positioned to succeed. I felt this was poignant, particularly from a sexegenarian born in Soviet Russia.

Excerpt quote from https://verdict-ai.nridigital.com/verdict_ai_jan19/garry_kasparov_ai_humans_technology Thanks for reading!