Garry Kasparov: evaluation

Transcript context

…Won’t AI just adjust much more quickly? AI progress in chess exceeded your expectations, the expectations of David Levy, many other people. It seems our system of education at K-12, the high school graduation rate has been almost stuck since the late 1960s, college graduation rate maybe is approaching 40 percent. It could take 30, 40 years to turn that around, even if we started doing everything right now. Are, in a sense, some people still left in the dust by these differential rates of change? Should we be so optimistic? Yes and no. We tend to forget that every dramatic change in human history caused also major problems. Whether we like it or not, the most dramatic technologic advance happened at a time of war, when people thought only about winning and having the best. They didn’t think about sacrifices or about comfort. I hope we can avoid repetition of the cycle. Naturally, we can expect substantial problems for many people who will have difficulty adjusting to new realities. What we can do: Let’s be objective, let’s talk about it. And let’s not terrorize them by the images of the Hollywood movies, like The Terminator or The Matrix. It’s a challenge that is ahead of us, but it’s not the end of the world. There will be downsides, but there will be upsides. Let’s see how we can manage our move into the future. Because what is the alternative? We don’t get to choose when and where technological progress stops. It’s happening. What I believe is the right approach is to understand that, while machines can do eventually better everything that we know how to do, there’s still so many new things that only we can reveal. I’m always calling for us looking for new frontiers. There’s no need to slow down, we just have to speed up. There’s so many new challenges. It’s up in space, down in the oceans, so many things that we’re not doing now because they’re too risky, and we like our comfortable life. Artificial intelligence — though I’m not as optimistic about its development — I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. It’s happening but it’s not a speed that is threatening us as predicted by the doomsayers. That will give us a push towards more risky adventures, forcing us to take the tasks that now we are rejecting because they are offering questionable returns with obvious risks. You’ve been a pioneer in what’s sometimes called advanced chess, freestyle chess, or centaur chess, where you pair a human being with a computer or a set of programs. Today, 2017, do you still think it’s the case that a human paired with a set of programs is better than playing against just the single strongest computer program in chess?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.