Kasparov was the John Henry of Chess
HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from laughably weak to nearly unbeatable during my twenty years as the world's top chess player.
As we will see, this is a pattern that has repeated over and over for centuries. People scoffed at every feeble attempt to substitute clumsy. fragile machines for the power of horses and oxen. We laughed at the idea that stiff wood and metal could replicate the soaring grace of the birds. Eventually we have had to concede that there is no physical labor that couldn't be replicated, or mechanically surpassed.
It is also now widely accepted that this inexorable advance is something to celebrate, not fear, although it is usually two steps forward and one step back in this regard. With every new encroachment of machines, the voices of panic and doubt are heard, and they are only getting louder today. This is partly due to the differences in what, and who, is being replaced. The horses and oxen couldn't write letters to the editor when cars and tractors came along. Unskilled laborers also lacked much of a voice, and were often considered lucky to be freed from their backbreaking toil.
Notes:
Folksonomies: automation
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Concepts:
Garry Kasparov (0.927962): dbpedia_resource
Methods for comparing top chess players throughout history (0.909248): dbpedia_resource
English-language films (0.901114): dbpedia_resource
Henry II of England (0.864522): dbpedia_resource
Chess (0.827319): dbpedia_resource
Game theory (0.794972): dbpedia_resource
Artificial intelligence (0.781334): dbpedia_resource
José Raúl Capablanca (0.778063): dbpedia_resource
Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins