Turning our grandest dreams into reality

Recommended by Tom Gruber

When I heard that Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player of all time, was going to give a TED talk about artificial intelligence, I was intrigued. Garry speaks from first-person experience about the inflection point in history when machines started to beat humans at our own games -- truly outperforming humans on tasks requiring substantial intelligence. As the expert on how machines beat humans at chess, he has a lot to reveal about how this technological feat was achieved, and in his recent book, he does. But that isn’t his message.

Garry's talk has something bigger to offer. It's not about the intelligent machine, it's about the nature of human intelligence and our relationship with artificial minds. In his beloved game of chess, Garry saw techniques of brute force eventually surpass a lifetime of human study and practice. But that didn't de-humanize the game. Instead, it upped the game into one where humans and machines play together, in partnership. And in this new game, the winners are those who can best master this human-machine collaboration, where each partner does what he, she or it does best. "Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion," Garry says.

Garry is a true humanist who has dedicated much of his career to the protection of human rights. And yet he rejects the idea that AI is competition for humanity, something to fear. Instead, he challenges us to embrace a new partnership with AI as an opportunity for humanity to "turn our grandest dreams into reality."