Don't fear intelligent machines. Work with them

We must face our fears if we want to get the most out of technology -- and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of humanity, says Garry Kasparov. One of the greatest chess players in history, Kasparov lost a memorable match to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. Now he shares his vision for a future where intelligent machines help us turn our grandest dreams into reality.

This story begins in 1985,

when at age 22,

I became the World Chess Champion

after beating Anatoly Karpov.

Earlier that year,

I played what is called
simultaneous exhibition

against 32 of the world's
best chess-playing machines

in Hamburg, Germany.

I won all the games,

and then it was not considered
much of a surprise

that I could beat 32 computers
at the same time.

To me, that was the golden age.

(Laughter)

Machines were weak,

and my hair was strong.

(Laughter)

Just 12 years later,

I was fighting for my life
against just one computer

in a match

called by the cover of "Newsweek"

"The Brain's Last Stand."

No pressure.

(Laughter)

From mythology to science fiction,

human versus machine

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

John Henry,

called the steel-driving man

in the 19th century
African American folk legend,

was pitted in a race

against a steam-powered hammer

bashing a tunnel through mountain rock.

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

pitting humanity versus technology.

And this competitive rhetoric
is standard now.

We are in a race against the machines,

in a fight or even in a war.

Jobs are being killed off.

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

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

are nonfiction.

There are very few instances of an arena

where the human body and mind
can compete on equal terms

with a computer or a robot.

Actually, I wish there were a few more.

Instead,

it was my blessing and my curse

to literally become the proverbial man

in the man versus machine competition

that everybody is still talking about.

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

I played two matches

against the IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue.

Nobody remembers
that I won the first match --

(Laughter)

(Applause)

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

But I guess that's fair.

There is no day in history,
special calendar entry

for all the people
who failed to climb Mt. Everest

before Sir Edmund Hillary
and Tenzing Norgay

made it to the top.

And in 1997, I was still
the world champion

when chess computers finally came of age.

I was Mt. Everest,

and Deep Blue reached the summit.

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

but its human creators --

Anantharaman, Campbell, Hoane, Hsu.

Hats off to them.

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

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

Deep Blue was victorious,

but was it intelligent?

No, no it wasn't,

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

had hoped.

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

once hardware got fast enough

and algorithms got smart enough.

Although by the definition of the output,

grandmaster-level chess,

Deep Blue was intelligent.

But even at the incredible speed,

200 million positions per second,

Deep Blue's method

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

Soon,

machines will be taxi drivers

and doctors and professors,

but will they be "intelligent?"

I would rather leave these definitions

to the philosophers and to the dictionary.

What really matters is how we humans

feel about living and working
with these machines.

When I first met Deep Blue
in 1996 in February,

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

and I had played 182
world championship games

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

I knew what to expect from my opponents

and what to expect from myself.

I was used to measure their moves

and to gauge their emotional state

by watching their body language
and looking into their eyes.

And then I sat across
the chessboard from Deep Blue.

I immediately sensed something new,

something unsettling.

You might experience a similar feeling

the first time you ride
in a driverless car

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

But when I sat at that first game,

I couldn't be sure

what is this thing capable of.

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

I lost that game.

And I couldn't help wondering,

might it be invincible?

Was my beloved game of chess over?

These were human doubts, human fears,

and the only thing I knew for sure

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

(Laughter)

I fought back

after this devastating blow

to win the first match,

but the writing was on the wall.

I eventually lost to the machine

but I didn't suffer the fate of John Henry

who won but died
with his hammer in his hand.

[John Henry Died with a Hammer in His Hand
Palmer C. Hayden]

[The Museum of African
American Art, Los Angeles]

It turned out that the world of chess

still wanted to have
a human chess champion.

And even today,

when a free chess app
on the latest mobile phone

is stronger than Deep Blue,

people are still playing chess,

even more than ever before.

Doomsayers predicted
that nobody would touch the game

that could be conquered by the machine,

and they were wrong, proven wrong,

but doomsaying has always been
a popular pastime

when it comes to technology.

What I learned from my own experience

is that we must face our fears

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

and we must conquer those fears

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

While licking my wounds,

I got a lot of inspiration

from my battles against Deep Blue.

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

Then I thought,

what if I could play with a computer --

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

human intuition
plus machine's calculation,

human strategy, machine tactics,

human experience, machine's memory.

Could it be the perfect game ever played?

My idea came to life

in 1998 under the name of Advanced Chess

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

But in this first experiment,

we both failed to combine
human and machine skills effectively.

Advanced Chess found
its home on the internet,

and in 2005, a so-called
freestyle chess tournament

produced a revelation.

A team of grandmasters
and top machines participated,

but the winners were not grandmasters,

not a supercomputer.

The winners were a pair
of amateur American chess players

operating three ordinary PCs
at the same time.

Their skill of coaching their machines

effectively counteracted
the superior chess knowledge

of their grandmaster opponents

and much greater
computational power of others.

And I reached this formulation.

A weak human player plus a machine

plus a better process is superior

to a very powerful machine alone,

but more remarkably,
is superior to a strong human player

plus machine

and an inferior process.

This convinced me that we would need

better interfaces
to help us coach our machines

towards more useful intelligence.

Human plus machine isn't the future,

it's the present.

Everybody that's used online translation

to get the gist of a news article
from a foreign newspaper,

knowing its far from perfect.

Then we use our human experience

to make sense out of that,

and then the machine
learns from our corrections.

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

The machine crunches data,

calculates probabilities,

gets 80 percent of the way, 90 percent,

making it easier for analysis

and decision-making of the human party.

But you are not going to send your kids

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

even with 99 percent.

So we need a leap forward

to add a few more crucial decimal places.

Twenty years after
my match with Deep Blue,

second match,

this sensational
"The Brain's Last Stand" headline

has become commonplace

as intelligent machines

move

in every sector, seemingly every day.

But unlike in the past,

when machines replaced

farm animals, manual labor,

now they are coming
after people with college degrees

and political influence.

And as someone
who fought machines and lost,

I am here to tell you
this is excellent, excellent news.

Eventually, every profession

will have to feel these pressures

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

We don't

get to choose

when and where
technological progress stops.

We cannot

slow down.

In fact,

we have to speed up.

Our technology excels at removing

difficulties and uncertainties
from our lives,

and so we must seek out

ever more difficult,

ever more uncertain challenges.

Machines have

calculations.

We have understanding.

Machines have instructions.

We have purpose.

Machines have

objectivity.

We have passion.

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

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

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

to turn our grandest dreams into reality.

And if we fail,

if we fail, it's not because our machines
are too intelligent,

or not intelligent enough.

If we fail, it's because
we grew complacent

and limited our ambitions.

Our humanity is not defined by any skill,

like swinging a hammer
or even playing chess.

There's one thing only a human can do.

That's dream.

So let us dream big.

Thank you.

(Applause)