Garry Kasparov: Humans Should Embrace The Change AI Will Bring

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology should be embraced by humans, and the rise of the machines will not be a threat to humanity.

Or at least that is the opinion of former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who was beaten by IBM’s DeepBlue supercomputer in 1996 and 1997.

At cyber security conference DefCon in Las Vegas, Kasparov noted that DeepBlue was merely as “intelligent as an alarm clock” having uses its compute power to brute force its way to winning techniques, and that the new wave of AI technology is much more advanced and capable of making significant societal changes.

Embrace change

Kasparov said the dawn of more genuinely intelligent systems and machines will invoke change of society that people will need to embrace, understanding that new technology will remove old jobs but will also pave the way for new ones.

“The problem is not that machines are replacing human jobs and that they are going after people with college degrees and Twitter accounts,” he said. “Technology, before it creates jobs kills them, it’s always done that.”

He highlighted that  AI systems bring benefits such as handling tasks humans would struggle with, using the example of a smart machine in healthcare being able to more accurately diagnose a patient’s conditions and then allow doctors and nurses to take action upon that diagnosis.

In essence, Kasparov believes that AIs can avoid the “shaky hands” of humans, especially in areas such as autonomous driving, benefiting society rather than destroying it.

“We all have these fears that machines will replace us and we’ll be extinguished but I believe there is plenty of room for creativity. And lots of it,” he said.

“It’s up to us humans to do what only humans can do and that’s dream and dream big so we can get the most out of these amazing new tools.”

The topic of AI and its impact is a divisive one, with technology luminaries Elon Musk and Mark Zukerberg clashing over their opinions on the development of AI.