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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)
Yasushi Aoki
This model is spreading and investing
in medical diagnosis, security analysis.
->
This model is spreading in investing,
medical diagnosis, security analysis.