Garry Kasparov: prediction

Transcript context

…A lot of humans don’t play chess, but we’re looking at a future where AI will make decisions about who gets a monetary loan, who is diagnosed as being schizophrenic or bipolar. How cars drive on the road increasingly is controlled by software. The fact that the decisions of the software are not so transparent — and you see this also in computer chess — how will ordinary human beings respond to the fact that more and more of their lives will be “controlled” by these nontransparent processes that are too smart for them to understand? Because in your book, you have emotional conflict with Deep Blue, right? Exactly. I’m telling you that it’s inevitable. There are certain things that are happening, and it’s called progress. This is the history of human civilization. The whole history is a steady process of replacing all forms of labor by machines. It started with machines replacing farm animals and then manual laborers, and it kept growing and growing and growing. There was a time I mentioned in the book, people didn’t trust elevators without operators. They thought it would be too dangerous. It took a major strike in the city of New York that was equal a major disaster. You had to climb the Empire State Building with paralyzed elevators. I understand that today, people are concerned about self-driving cars, absolutely. But now let us imagine that there was a time, I’m sure, people were really concerned, they were scared stiff of autopilots. Now, I think if you tell them that autopilot’s not working in the plane, they will not fly because they understand that, in the big numbers, these decisions are still more qualitative. While I understand also the fear of people who might be losing jobs, and they could see that machines are threatening their traditional livelihood, but at the same time, even these people whose jobs are on chopping block of automation, they also depend on the new wave of technology to generate economic growth and to create sustainable new jobs. This is a cycle. The only difference with what we have been seeing throughout human history is that now, machines are coming after people with college degrees, political influence, and Twitter accounts. Say I’m at the self-checkout in the supermarket. If something doesn’t work, I sometimes get fairly frustrated. If I’m with a human cashier, maybe a new person they’re just training, and they don’t do it properly, I don’t get frustrated at all. I’m very tolerant because it’s a human. But the machine, it’s much harder for me, just like it can be harder to play against Deep Blue than another human. Are we doomed to a future where things maybe work more effectively, but we’re frustrated all the time because there’s no human-to-human interaction to ease?…

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