Worry About Human (Not Machine) Intelligence

I became the proverbial man in “man versus machine” when I faced the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue across the chessboard in the 1990s. In fact, The Man vs. the Machine was the very name of ESPN’s 2014 documentary about our two contests.

I defeated Deep Blue (4–2) in our first face-off in 1996. When the computer defeated me in the first of our six games, it marked the first time a machine had won a game against a world champion under classical tournament conditions. When the computer beat me in the decisive sixth game of our 1997 rematch, its 3.5–2.5 victory (winning two games, with three draws) marked the first time a computer had ever won a classical match against a world champion.

(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Garry Kasparov.)

When I lost the rematch, it was hailed by many as a momentous occasion for human progress on par with the Moon landing. I didn’t feel so enthusiastic about it myself, but I realized that while the era of intelligent machines was ending in chess, it was only getting started in every other aspect of our lives.

Real life—language, business, education, health—doesn’t have a tidy framework like chess. Artificial intelligence (AI) today begins with a huge amount of data and clever algorithms to analyze it, without strict pre-existing rules. Machine learning is pushing the frontier of what machines can do better than humans—medical diagnosis, legal research—and how it does it has limitless potential.

This type of AI doesn’t care why something works, as long as it works. These machines even teach themselves better ways to learn, effectively coding themselves iteratively. Chess, still an AI bellwether, demonstrated this principle in astonishing fashion in late 2017, when the machine-learning algorithm AlphaZero taught itself to play better than any existing program or human after four hours of playing against itself. Think about all the new ways of solving problems based on objective results instead of centuries of accumulated human dogma. This is a brave new world, one in which machines are doing things humans do not know how to teach them to do, one in which machines figure out the rules—and, if we are lucky, explain them to us.

If this sounds threatening instead of amazing, you’ve been watching too many dystopian Hollywood movies. Humans will still set the goals and establish the priorities. We must ensure that our agnostic machines represent the best of our human morality. If we succeed, our new tools will make us smarter, enabling us to better understand our world and ourselves. Our real challenge is to avoid complacency, to keep thinking up new directions for AI to explore. And that’s one job that can never be done by a machine.

One very real area of concern, however, is the political polarization of the world.

Since I retired from professional chess, much of my life has been divided between human rights activism and investigations into human and machine cognition, and we are at a critical inflection point in both areas.

The global rise of authoritarianism threatens to roll back a half-century of democratic proliferation that was capped by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. Today, freedom is under assault from all sides—geographically from the Americas to Europe to Asia, politically from both right and left, in regimes that have relatively little experience with democracy and in several of the world’s freest states. The political center is being hollowed out, with extremist positions leading to backlash and whiplash.

Over half the world’s population lives under nondemocratic regimes today. Even more troubling, that percentage has been rising. Autocratic regimes like my native Russia have become full-blown dictatorships. A tide of illiberal nationalism is rising in eastern Europe, just one generation removed from life behind the Iron Curtain. Traditional defenders of the values of openness and liberty, the United Kingdom and the United States, were dealt shocking election results by the forces of isolation and nativism.

If this trend against freedom is not combated and reversed, the world is headed into a new era of conflict between great powers, with all the human suffering that would entail. The free world is still ascendant—economically, politically, militarily—but if there is no will to leverage that power to make the world freer and safer for all, that advantage will continue to wane.

This essay was originally published in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018).