Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…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. Let me ask you some of my questions. We’ll start with topics related to your book. If we think of computer chess as a kind of project, along with AlphaGo, as somewhat of a referendum on human intelligence, that is, for decades, even centuries, humans have been trying to solve chess and Go and play it better, and understand how the games work. Then, artificial intelligence comes along, computer chess, and they teach us how far off we were. If you think of artificial intelligence as teaching us something about humans, what kind of mistakes we make, how smart we are, or how stupid we are, how would you judge the results of these referenda? I don’t think the founding fathers of computer science had the same affection to Go or Shogi because they are not familiar or had very little knowledge of these games that were played in other parts of the world. Chess was a game that for centuries had an ultimate sign, a mark of unique intelligence. It was quite natural for them to look at the game of chess as the milestone for breaking up this mystery of human intelligence.…

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