Garry Kasparov on AI – Should Smart Machines Scare Us?

On the face of it, no one should be more bitter about AI than Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. In 1997, he took part in the most well-publicized man-machine contest of the 20^th century, a chess match against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. When Deep Blue won, it was a defining moment for artificial intelligence, the Watson / Jeopardy moment of its day.

But Kasparov saw the future — not computers that defeated people, but computers that enhanced people. He prefers to call Deep Blue not artificial intelligence but augmented intelligence. When he set up chess matches where people played with computers, he found that the best chess players with the best computers didn’t necessarily win — the winners were the people who knew best how to work with the computers.

Kasparov has spent the last 20 years working in the area of human-machine collaboration. As he explained in his keynote presentation at FICO World 2018, the Decisions Conference, his is a message of hope. He rejects the fears that AI will take over the world in a Terminator scenario.

Watch Kasparov discuss the evolution of AI, explainable AI and other topics in this funny and fascinating video.