knowledge and our understanding of the world. Starting in the thirteenth century, grinding glass led to glasses, and eventually to the telescope and the microscope, tools of human enhancement that dramatically improved our ability to control our environment via improved navigation and medical research. Perhaps only the compass is an earlier invention that provided us with information otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain. The abacus, from the third millennium BC, is as much a method as a machine, but it is likely the first device to augment human intelligence. The alphabet, paper, and the printing press didn’t exactly create knowledge, but performed the essential corollary task of preserving and distributing it, much as the Internet does. My own experiences battling computers across a game board are the exception that proves the rule. We aren’t competing against our machines, no matter how many human jobs they can do. We are competing with ourselves to create new challenges and to extend our capabilities and to improve our lives. In turn, these challenges will require even more capable machines and people to build them and train them and maintain them—until we can make machines that do those things too, and the cycle continues. If we feel like we are being surpassed by our own technology it’s because we aren’t pushing ourselves hard enough, aren’t being ambitious enough in our goals and dreams. Instead of worrying about what machines can do, we should worry more about what they still cannot do. I will say again that I am not unsympathetic to those whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by disruptive new technology. Few people in the world know better than I do what it’s like to have your life’s work threatened by a machine. No one was sure what would happen if and when a chess machine beat the world champion. Would there still be professional chess tournaments? Would there be sponsorship and media coverage of my world championship matches if people thought the best chess player in the world was a machine? Would people still play chess at all? The answer to all of these questions turned out to be yes, thankfully, but these doomsday scenarios were one reason some in the chess community criticized my eagerness to participate in human versus machine events at all. I suppose I could have delayed the inevitable a little by declining, and forcing the programmers to challenge other top players. If a machine had beaten Anand or Karpov, the next players on the rating list after me at the time of my rematch with Deep Blue in May 1997, the story would have been “Nice, but would it beat Kasparov?” But that would only last until I was no longer the world champion, which happened in 2000, or until I was no longer ranked number one and I retired from chess, which happened in 2005. I was never one to duck a challenge, and being remembered as the first world champion to lose a match to a computer cannot be worse than being remembered as the first world champion to run away from a computer. And I didn’t want to run away. I was thrilled by these new trials, by the scientific pursuit, by the new avenues to promote chess, and, frankly, by the attention and the money that sometimes came with it all. Why should someone else be the first, for better or for worse? Why should I exchange a unique and historic role as a participant to become just another spectator? Nor did I believe the apocalyptic predictions about what might happen if I lost a match to a machine. I was always optimistic about the future of chess in the digital age, and not because of the trite and imprecise “people still run footraces even though cars are faster” justifications that many were making at the time. John Henry aside, automobiles didn’t make walking obsolete or put pedestrians out of work. Many things on Earth are faster than Usain Bolt’s top speed of thirty miles per hour, from coyotes (40 m.p.h.) to kangaroos (44 m.p.h.). So what? Chess is a very different matter from physical sports, as strong chess machines can directly and indirectly influence human play. You can think of them as more analogous to steroids and other forms of doping in physical sports, as an external augmentation with the potential to boost performance or to
