What can we learn from Gerry Kasparov about AI?
What you can see in the image right below is Gerry Kasparov, Chess Grandmaster and World Chess Champion from 1985 to 2000. He’s known also to be a political activist and writer.
In the aside image there’s another Chess Champion, and as you can see it isn’t human: Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer RS/6000, born in 1986 and upgraded in 1987. Its only purpose was to play chess, like Kasparov, but unlike him he couldn’t be a political activist. He won a few games and only one tournament, but he changed the history of both cybernetics and chess.
In 1996, he won his first match against Kasparov, who eventually won the tournament 4–2. It was the first time a computer had won a chess match against a human. In 1997, the challenge was repeated. IBM upgraded Deep Blue with faster memory and processors, so this time Deep Blue won the tournament 3–2. Intel, a competitor of IBM and sponsor of the chess federation, was so annoyed that it withdrew its sponsorship of subsequent tournaments.
Computers have always been used for games, especially those based on logic, and of course chess is one of the games that most tests human (and not human) reasoning and memory.
In this image you can see the moment when Kasparov gets up after losing the last match of 1997’s tournament. The other guy you see in the photo was replaced every 4 hours: his only purpose was simply to physically move the pieces on the board under the orders of the Artificial Intelligence. Nobody remembers his name.
In the following days and month, Kasparov began to think about his defeat, and he realized he had 3 possible choices:
1 — Continue to play without any help from computers or artificial intelligence. and he would probably continue to lose. He had realized the strengths of the computer, and he knew he could not be at the same level.
2 — Be the guy who moved the pieces on the board, simply doing what the Artificial Intelligence wanted him to do. It was not for him.
3 — Play not against the computer but with it, play with the AI to speed up the retrieval of information and insert the Human touch of genius, put in the only thing that the computer could not have, the passion for doing the things we love.
That’s what Kasparov did, wondering what would have happened if he had all the information of Deep Blue at his disposal and the same speed in collecting it. Kasparov introduced a new way of playing, a kind of freestyle of chess. This type of player was called Centaur, half Kasparov and half Deep Blue. In 2014, the Chess Freestyle Battle saw the AIs win 42 games, but the Centaurus won 53.
Today, most chess champions train with an AI, such as Magnus Carlsen, world champion until 2022. This was the strategy chosen by Kasparov to face the breaking point, the disruption point of the chess world. A necessary evolution to face digital Darwinism.
Today we have to do the Kasparov’s choice: fight against AI, obey to its orders, work with it.
If we let AI do our job without any control, we are in choice number 2, we are moving the pieces obeying AI orders. And that is exactly what we have been doing since November 30, 2022, since OpenAI gave the world the possibility to use its bot, chatGPT, to access the statistical systems of Deep Learning and the neural network of its Artificial Intelligence. With the multiplication of interfaces, from Claude to NotebookLM, from Llama to Gemini, the chessboard has increased in size and therefore more hands are needed to move the pieces.
The choice now is whether to accept the answers provided by the AI as the final output, or use them as input for our human brain.
