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Kasparov

Kasparov

I've been building with AI a lot over the last few months and documenting the journey over at haihai.ai. I'll occasionally cross-post here, but subscribe will leave it to you to subscribe over there if you want the full nerdery.

I spoke at a tech conference in New York last wee. My talk was called Opening Moves in AI, and it was the first talk I've given to an IRL audience in three years. (I used to speak a lot). It was a 50 minute talk featuring a bunch of live demos of how folks can do their jobs faster and better with AI today.

My opening talk track was about Garry Kasparov. Garry Kasparov was the world chess champion in the 1980s and 1990s, and in 1997 famously lost a match to Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM for the express purpose of beating him. Losing that match gave Kasparov legitimate claim to the title of "first person to lose their job to AI" – for he was no longer the best chess player in the world. Kasparov spent the next 25 years deeply considering the impact of AI on his industry, and hasa a refreshingly optimistic outlook for folks who are concerned that their jobs might be impact by AI: "Don't fear the machines. Work with them."

Below is a post I wrote over at haihai on Kasparov, the impact of AI on chess over the last 25 years, and what we all can learn from it.

The first man to lose his job to AI
Garry Kasparov says, “Don’t fear intelligent machines. Work with them.”