Chess and AI

Garry Kasparov was the chess world champion for over a decade, making him one of the undisputable greats of all time, and yet in his computer speech, he still manages to extol the benefits of advancements in artificial intelligence.

That's surprising because of Kasparov's most notable popular historical claim. Though the former world champion is a chess legend, most people who aren't fans of chess know his name because of a highly publicized defeat he suffered in 1997. Famously, Kasparov lost to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, marking the first time ever than an AI system had been able to defeat a world champion chess player in the elegantly simple yet immense board game.

Proud and competitive, one might think that Kasparov's experience would set him on a lifelong vendetta against artificially intelligent technology. However, he takes precisely the opposite tack. One of the most common anxieties about AI is that they'll be so adept at their assigned tasks that humans will simply stop trying. He notes that even today, when the free chess app on one's smartphone is more powerful than Deep Blue ever was, we still marvel at Magnus Carlsen just as much as we did Kasparov back in the 80s.