WEBVTT

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This story begins in 1985,

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when at age 22,

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I became the world chess champion

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after beating Anatoly Karpov.

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Earlier that year,

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I played what is called
simultaneous exhibition

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against 32 of the world's
best chess playing machines

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in Hamburg, Germany.

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I won all the games,

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and then it was not considered
much of a surprise

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that I could beat 32 computers
at the same time.

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To me, that was the golden age.

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(Laughter)

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Machines were weak,

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and my hair was strong.

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(Laughter)

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Just 12 years later,

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I was fighting for my life
against just one computer

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in a match

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called by the cover of Newsweek

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"The Brain's Last Stand."

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No pressure.

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(Laughter)

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From mythology to science fiction,

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human versus machine

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has been often portrayed
as a matter of life and death.

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John Henry called the steel-driving man

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in the 19th century
African American folk legend

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was pitted in a race

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against steam-powered hammer

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bashing a tunnel through mountain rock.

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John Henry's legend is a part
of a long historical narrative

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pitting humanity versus technology.

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And this competitive rhetoric
is standard now.

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We are in a race against the machines,

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in a fight or even in a war.

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Jobs are being killed off.

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People are being replaced
as if they had vanished from the Earth.

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It's enough to think that the movies
like "The Terminator" or "The Matrix"

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are nonfiction.

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There are very few instances in an arena

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where the human body and mind
can compete on equal terms

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with a computer or a robot.

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Actually, I wish there were a few more.

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Instead, it was my blessing and my curse

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to literally become the proverbial man

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in the man versus machine competition

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that everybody is still talking about.

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In a most famous human-machine
competition since John Henry,

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I played two matches

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against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.

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Nobody remembers
that I won the first match --

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(Laughter)

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(Applause) --

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in Philadelphia, before losing the rematch
the following year in New York.

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But I guess that's fair.

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There is no day in history
special calendar entry

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for all the people who failed
to climb Mt. Everest

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before Sir Edmund Hillary
and Tenzing Norgay

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made it to the top.

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And in 1997, I was still
the world champion

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when chess computers finally came of age.

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I was Mt. Everest,

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and Deep Blue reached the summit.

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I should stay of course,
not that Deep Blue did it,

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but its human creators --

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Anantharaman, Campbell, Hoane, Hsu.

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Hats off to them.

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As always, machine's triumph
was a human triumph,

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something we tend to forget when humans
are surpassed by our own creations.

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Deep Blue was victorious,

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but was it intelligent?

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No, no it wasn't,

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at least not in the way Alan Turing
and other founders of computer science

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had hoped.

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It turned out that chess could be
crunched by brute force,

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once hardware got fast enough

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and algorithms got smart enough.

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Although by the definition of the output,

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grandmaster-level chess,
Deep Blue was intelligent,

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but even at the incredible speed,

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200 million positions per second,

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Deep Blue's method

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provided little of the dreamed-of insight
into the mysteries of human intelligence.

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Soon, machines will be taxi drivers

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and doctors and professors,

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but will they be "intelligent?"

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I would rather leave these definitions

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to the philosophers and to the dictionary.

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What really matters is how we humans

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feel about living and working
with these machines.

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When I first met Deep Blue
in 1996 in February,

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I had been the world champion
for more than 10 years,

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and I had played 182
world championship games

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and hundreds of games against
other top players in other competitions.

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I knew what to expect
from my opponents

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and what to expect from myself.

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I was used to measure

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their moves and to gauge
their emotional state

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by watching their body language
and looking into their eyes.

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And then I sat across
the chess board from Deep Blue.

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I immediately sensed something new,

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something unsettling.

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You might experience a similar feeling

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the first time you ride
in a driverless car

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or the first time your new computer
manager issues an order at work.

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But when I sat at that first game,

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I couldn't be sure

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what is the thing capable of.

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Technology can advance in leaps,
and IBM had invested heavily.

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I lost that game,

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and I couldn't help wondering,

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might it be invincible?

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Was my beloved game of chess over?

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These were human doubts, human fears,

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and the only thing I knew for sure

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was that my opponent Deep Blue
had no such worries at all.

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(Laughter)

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I fought back

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after this devastating blow
to win the first match,

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but the writing was on the wall.

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I eventually lost to the machine

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but I didn't suffer the fate of John Henry

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who won but died
with his hammer in his hand.

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It turned out that the world of chess

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still wanted to have
a human chess champion.

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And even today, when a free chess app

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on the latest mobile phone
is stronger than Deep Blue,

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people are still playing chess,

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even more than ever before.

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Doomsayers predicted that nobody
would touch the game

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that could be conquered by the machine,

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and they were wrong, proving wrong,

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but doomsaying has always been
a popular pasttime

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when it comes to technology.

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What I learned from my own experience

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is that we must face our fears

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if we want to get the most
out of our technology,

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and we must conquer those fears

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if we want to get the best
out of our humanity.

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While licking my wounds,

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I got a lot of inspiration

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from my battles against Deep Blue.

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As the old Russian saying goes,
if you can't beat them, join them.

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Then I thought,

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what if I could play with a computer,

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together with a computer at my side,
combining our strengths,

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human intuition
plus machine's calculation,

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human strategy, machine tactics,

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human experience, machine's memory.

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Could it be the perfect game ever played?

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My idea came to life

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in 1998 on the name of advanced chess

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when I played this human-plus-machine
competition against another elite player,

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but in this first experiment,

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we both failed to combine human
and machine skills effectively.

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Advanced chess found
its home on the Internet,

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and in 2005, a so-called freestyle
chess tournament

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produced a revelation.

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A team of grandmasters
and top machines participated,

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but the winners were not grandmasters,

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not a supercomputer.

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The winners were a pair of amateur
American chess players

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operating three ordinary PCs
at the same time.

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Their skill of coaching their machines

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effectively counteracted
the superior chess knowledge

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of their grandmaster opponents

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and much greater computational
power of others,

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and I reached this formulation.

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A weak human player plus a machine

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plus a better process is superior

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to a very power machine alone,

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but more remarkably, is superior
to a strong human player

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plus machine and an inferior process.

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This convinced me that we would need

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better interfaces to help us
coach our machines

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towards more useful intelligence.

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Human plus machine isn't the future,

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it's present.

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Everybody that's used online translation
to get the gist of a news article

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from a foreign newspaper

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knowing its far from perfect.

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Then we use our human experience

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to make sense out of that,

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and then machine learns
from our corrections.

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This model is spreading and investing
in medical diagnosis, security analysis.

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The machine crunches data,

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calculates probabilities,

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gets 80 percent of the way, 90 percent,

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making it easier for analysis

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and decision-making of the human party.

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But you are not going to send your kids

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to school in self-driving car
with 90 percent accuracy,

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even with 99 percent.

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So we need a leap forward

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to add a few more crucial decimal places.

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Twenty years after
my match with Deep Blue,

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second match,

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this sensational "The Brain's
Last Stand" headline

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has become commonplace

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as intelligent machines

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move in every sector, seemingly every day.

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But unlike in the past,

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when machines replaced farm animals,

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manual labor, now they are coming after
people with college degrees

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and political influence,

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and as someone who fought machines
and lost, I am here to tell you

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this is excellent, excellent news.

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Eventually, every profession

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will have to feel these pressures

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or else it will mean humanity
has ceased to make progress.

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We don't get to choose

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when and where
technological progress stops.

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We cannot slow down.

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In fact, we have to speed up.

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Our technology excels at removing

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difficulties and uncertainties

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from our lives,

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and so we must seek out

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ever more difficult,

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ever more uncertain challenges.

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Machines have calculations.

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We have understanding.

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Machines have instructions.

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We have purpose.

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Machines have objectivity.

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We have passion.

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We should not worry about what
our machines can do today.

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Instead, we should worry about
what they still cannot do today,

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because we will need the help
of the new, intelligent machines

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to turn our grandest dreams into reality.

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And if we fail,

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if we fail, it's not because our machines

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are too intelligent,
or not intelligent enough.

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If we fail, it's because
we grew complacent

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and limited our ambitions.

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Our humanity is not defined by any skill,

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like swinging a hammer
or even playing chess.

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There's one thing only a human can do.

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That's dream.

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So let us dream big.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)