Garry Kasparov, World Chess Champion and AI Advocate
Humans started dreaming of intelligent machines long before the computer age and their starting point has always been chess; from the Mechanical Turk of the 18th century to Alan Turing’s chess program and today’s Deep Blue. It has been Garry’s blessing and, he says, his curse, to play a central role in that quest, playing against each generation’s strongest computer champions, contributing to their development and devising new ways for humans and machines to achieve more through partnership than they could ever achieve alone.
He bids us to embrace rather than fear AI’s potential. Human labour has progressively been replaced by technology and we shouldn’t panic if that now extends to cognitive as well as physical work. Let’s focus, he says, on what intelligent machines can enable us to do and how the creativity of this generation can be empowered to use technology creatively in ways previously unimagined.
In this keynote presentation Garry will focus on the ultimate AI challenge; how to keep humans and our unique decision-making capabilities – our intuition, moral judgement and creativity – firmly in the loop, while still reaping the benefits of intelligent machines.
Garry Kasparov was the world’ top ranked chess player for twenty years and his famous matches against the IBM super-computer Deep Blue in 1996-97 brought chess and artificial intelligence into the global mainstream. Today his US-based Kasparov Chess Foundation promotes the teaching of chess around the world, while Garry himself campaigns for human rights, chairs the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation and advises businesses audiences around the world on innovation, strategy, individual freedom and achieving peak mental performance. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School, with a focus on human-machine collaboration. His book on strategy and decision making, ‘How Life Imitates Chess’ is published in over 20 languages. He is currently working on a new book about AI, which details his matches against Deep Blue, his years of research and his ongoing cooperation with the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.
“The human-machine relationship is today’s most important development in technology, business and education. Understanding it will determine who shapes the 21st century.”
