Garry Kasparov: "AI is not replacing us, it is promoting us!"

It is not usual for an internationally renowned personality such as Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion and expert in artificial intelligence, to give a lecture in Barcelona open to the public. That is why this Monday afternoon at the Montjuïc venue of Fira de Barcelona, ​​​​where the Talent Arena organized by Mobile World Capital is being held within the framework of the MWC, not a single step could be taken. Hundreds of people have come to listen to the guru and his presentation. The nexus of human creativity and machine intelligence, in which an optimistic message predominated: "They are not replacing us, they are promoting us!".

Kasparov began the conference with a question: "How many of you out there think that AI is a threat to humanity?" In front of some raised hands, he replied: "I come to calm things down, we must treat it as a tool that can help us, but we must be cautious," he asserted.

Kasparov (Baku, Azerbaijan, 1963) became the USSR under-18 chess champion at the age of 12 and the U-20 world champion at the age of 17. He achieved international fame at the age of 22 as the youngest world champion. However, he is best known for being the man who took on the machine: in 1997 Kasparov played a series of chess games against Deep Blue, the supercomputer designed by IBM, in a competition that had half the world in suspense. Kasparov had previously faced chess-playing machines, but they had not been a match: "At that time, the machines were weak and my hair was strong," he says, laughing.

But Deep Blue was able to beat him. "Now many people think that the 1997 match was an artificial intelligence dome. But was Blue intelligent? Of course not. It was as intelligent as an alarm clock. [...] But it didn't have to be intelligent, it had to be good enough to use brute force and to make fewer mistakes than me, as it did," he mused. "After so many years, I recognise that the game I played then was important, and I think I made a great sacrifice in addition to losing my reputation for the good of humanity; many people became interested in computer science after that event," he recalls.

After that experience, Kasparov entered the world of AI, and now leaves as a lesson that "we should not be afraid of machines." "Balance is the key: we can do many more things saving time because data will help us use our human creativity," he says. In fact, Kasparov refers to AI as "augmented intelligence," since "just as glasses improve our vision, AI increases our skills, it does not replace them."

"We should not live in panic, it is not about machines being responsible for human behaviour," he recalled. "In the hands of bad people it can be bad, but it is not the fault of technology; we must be able to work together to be better," he said.