CONTAGIOUS

Its a few months late, but happy 10 year anniversary to Deep Blue vs Kasparov! To commemorate the event, Dennett wrote up a short, and I think painfully superficial, discussion in MIT’s Technology Review.

Higher Games

The verdict that computers are the equal of human beings in chess could hardly be more official, which makes the caviling all the more pathetic. The excuses sometimes take this form: “Yes, but machines don’t play chess the way human beings play chess!” Or sometimes this: “What the machines do isn’t really playing chess at all.” Well, then, what would be really playing chess?

This is not a trivial question. The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don’t know when to accept a draw. Computers–at least currently existing computers–can’t be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors always have to contend with, and sometimes even exploit, in their games. Offering or accepting a draw, or resigning, is the one decision that opens the hermetically sealed world of chess to the real world, in which life is short and there are things more important than chess to think about. This boundary crossing can be simulated with an arbitrary rule, or by allowing the computer’s handlers to step in. Human players often try to intimidate or embarrass their human opponents, but this is like the covert pushing and shoving that goes on in soccer matches. The imperviousness of computers to this sort of gamesmanship means that if you beat them at all, you have to beat them fair and square–and isn’t that just what ­Kasparov and Kramnik were unable to do? |via Reality Apologetics|

I am personally convinced that humanity lost its place at the top of the evolutionary food chain when Kasparov lost the game in 1997. To be specific, I think humanity lost its sovereignty over machines when Kasparov cracked during game 2 and started accusing IBM of cheating because Deep Blue made a move that “only a human could make”. That’s the exact same kind of paranoid delusion that naively convinces us that we have minds, or at least that our minds cannot be understood in terms of neural processing alone. Once Kasparov gave that power up to the machine, we lost the race. For this reason, I think Dennett is exactly wrong to suggest that a game against a machine must be fought ‘fair and square’; Deep Blue’s mere status as a machine has an intimidating and disorienting effect on its opponents that works to its advantage, even if it doesn’t intend to do so. The fact that Kasparov’s only conceivable explanation was that some human made the move for Deep Blue simply shows that even after we lost, we refused to accept defeat. Ah, the enduringly stubborn human spirit.

I have to admit that I am somewhat inconvenienced by the timeliness of this anniversary, because I just finished writing an article bemoaning the failures of the ‘classic debate’ over AI and making a plea to move past the debate in order to have a genuine discussion of the kinds of artificially intelligent systems that already populate our world. The internet, on the other hand, wants to retread the old AI arguments, which I find tired, boring, and smacking of a kind of naive futurism. I know of no worse insult than to call someone a futurist, but the question “will it be possible to build an intelligent machine?” encourages all sorts of wild guessing about how technology will behave in the future. I am quite adamant about the fact that artificial intelligence is not just a possibility in the forever distant sci-fi future, but is living beside us and working with us even today.

By the way, you should read Reality Apologetics. Jon’s wrong about everything, but he’s framing it in a way that I find very useful for pointing out just how wrong he is.