But look at the big picture," he said.īut he called for better regulation worldwide to help limit the negative impact of social media and other evolving technologies. I don't want to sound callous-people will lose jobs. Kasparov might be described as a techno-optimist, but he does not totally dismiss the fears of AI naysayers who worry that robots will replace jobs once done by humans, from factory workers to truck drivers. While Terminator-style robo-assassins remain the stuff of science fiction, human rights groups are already pushing for international laws to restrict the use of so-called " killer robots", predicting that AI will transform warfare in the years to come.Īt the Web Summit, meanwhile, tech gurus have spent the week discussing more positive potential applications of AI, from intelligent chatbots that boost our mental health to sorting plastic waste. The true threat, the Kremlin critic says, comes from "the dictatorial, totalitarian countries and the terrorists who will use this technology to harm us". The real danger comes not from killer robots but from people-because people still have a monopoly on evil." "There is simply no evidence that machines are threatening us. Whether you like it or not, it's happening," he said. "We live in a world where machines are playing bigger and bigger roles. When he wasn't busy taking on 10 simultaneous chess opponents at Lisbon's Web Summit this week-handily beating them all in 45 minutes-he spoke to AFP about AI's growing role in society. While experts said the results are impressive, and have potential across a wide-range of applications to complement human knowledge, professor Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist and AI researcher at the University of Bath, warned that it was “still a discrete task”.Kasparov has remained fascinated by technology since his famous matches against IBM's Deep Blue computer in the 1990s. The new generalised AlphaZero was also able to beat the “super human” former version of itself AlphaGo at the Chinese game of Go after only eight-hours of self-training, winning 60 games and losing 40 games. AlphaZero won 90 games, lost eight and drew 2. The result, according to DeepMind, is that AlphaZero took an “arguably more human-like approach” to the search for moves, processing around 80,000 positions per second in chess compared to Stockfish 8’s 70m.Īfter winning 25 games of chess versus Stockfish 8 starting as white, with first-mover advantage, a further three starting with black and drawing a further 72 games, AlphaZero also learned shogi in two hours before beating the leading program Elmo in a 100-game matchup. The rest it works out by playing itself over and over with self-reinforced knowledge. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty ImagesĭeepMind said the difference between AlphaZero and its competitors is that its machine-learning approach is given no human input apart from the basic rules of chess. Ĭhess enthusiasts watch World Chess champion Garry Kasparov on a television monitor in 1997. “We have always assumed that chess required too much empirical knowledge for a machine to play so well from scratch, with no human knowledge added at all.”Ĭomputer programs have been able to beat the best human chess players ever since IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Kasparov on. “It’s a remarkable achievement, even if we should have expected it after AlphaGo,” former world chess champion Garry Kasparov told. “Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case,” said the paper’s authors that include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, who was a child chess prodigy reaching master standard at the age of 13. AlphaZero won or drew all 100 games, according to a non-peer-reviewed research paper published with Cornell University Library’s arXiv.