Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I’m here with Garry Kasparov. Garry, of course, is the world’s greatest chess player ever. More importantly, I think of him as a man who has never, ever shied away from a challenge. He is one of the least complacent people I know, truly brave and courageous. He has a new book out. The title is Deep Thinking. Garry himself is an extremely deep thinker in virtually all areas. The subtitle is Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. Whereas in Garry’s previous book, Winter Is Coming, this time around it’s a little more cheery and, at least in some regards, finally, spring has arrived. Garry, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. And you’re right, yeah. This book is more cheery than the previous one. I thought it would be a good idea to keep a balance. In both cases, I went against the dominant trend at the moment. When Winter Is Coming was written and published, many people here in this country or in the free world, they had doubts about my strong statements about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Now, regarding this book, Deep Thinking, when I was writing the book, many people tended to believe Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and other pessimists, who predicted a doomsday scenario, when artificial intelligence would inevitably take over our world. This time, I took the opposite side, the optimistic side, and this book was an attempt to write a real story of artificial intelligence and its connection to the game of chess: Why the founding fathers of computer science, like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, had such an affection for the game of chess, and why they believed that solving the game of chess or, more likely, making machines capable of beating strongest players, could help them to solve the problems of artificial intelligence, and why, by the way, they were wrong.…

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