Grandmasters and Global Growth
Kenneth Rogoff
CAMBRIDGE – As the global economy limps out of the last decade and enters a new one in 2010, what will be the next big driver of global growth? Here’s betting that the “teens” is a decade in which artificial intelligence hits escape velocity, and starts to have an economic impact on par with the emergence of India and China.
Admittedly, my perspective is heavily colored by events in the world of chess, a game I once played at a professional level and still follow from a distance. Though special, computer chess nevertheless offers both a window into silicon evolution and a barometer of how people might adapt to it.
A little bit of history might help. In 1996 and 1997, World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov played a pair of matches against an IBM computer named “Deep Blue.” At the time, Kasparov dominated world chess, in the same way that Tiger Woods – at least until recently – has dominated golf. In the 1996 match, Deep Blue stunned the champion by beating him in the first game. But Kasparov quickly adjusted to exploit the computer’s weakness in long-term strategic planning, where his judgment and intuition seemed to trump the computer’s mechanical counting.
Unfortunately, the supremely confident Kasparov did not take Deep Blue seriously enough in the 1997 rematch. Deep Blue shocked the champion, winning the match 3.5 to 2.5. Many commentators have labeled Deep Blue’s triumph one of the most important events of the twentieth century.
Perhaps Kasparov would have won the rematch had it continued to a full 24 games (then the standard length of world championship matches). But, over the next few years, even as humans learned from computers, computers improved at a far faster pace.
With ever more powerful processors, silicon chess players developed the ability to calculate so far ahead that the distinction between short-term tactical calculations and long-term strategic planning became blurred. At the same time, computer programs began to exploit huge databases of games between grandmaster (the highest title in chess), using results from the human games to extrapolate what moves have the highest chances of success. Soon, it became clear that even the best human chess players would have little chance to do better than an occasional draw.
Today, chess programs have become so good that even grandmasters sometimes struggle to understand the logic behind some of their moves. In chess magazines, one often sees comments from top players such as “My silicon friend says I should have moved my King instead of my Queen, but I still think I played the best ‘human’ move.”
It gets worse. Many commercially available computer programs can be set to mimic the styles of top grandmasters to an extent that is almost uncanny. Indeed, chess programs now come very close to passing the late British mathematician Alan Turing’s ultimate test of artificial intelligence: can a human conversing with the machine tell it is not human?
I sure can’t. Ironically, as computer-aided cheating increasingly pervades chess tournaments (with accusations reaching the highest levels), the main detection device requires using another computer. Only a machine can consistently tell what another computer would do in a given position. Perhaps if Turing were alive today, he would define artificial intelligence as the inability of a computer to tell whether another machine is human!
So has all this put chess players out of work? Encouragingly, the answer is “not yet.” In fact, in some ways, chess is as popular and successful today as at any point in the last few decades. Chess lends itself very well to Internet play, and fans can follow top-level tournaments in real time, often with commentary. Technology has helped thoroughly globalize chess, with the Indian Vishy Anand now the first Asian world champion, and the handsome young Norwegian Magnus Carlsen having reached rock-star status. Man and machine have learned to co-exist, for now.
Of course, this is a microcosm of the larger changes that we can expect. The horrible computerized telephone-answering systems that we all now suffer with might actually improve. Imagine, someday you might actually prefer digital to human operators.
In 50 years, computers might be doing everything from driving taxis to performing routine surgery. Sooner than that, artificial intelligence will transform higher learning, potentially making a world-class university education broadly affordable even in poor developing countries. And, of course, there are more mundane but crucial uses of artificial intelligence everywhere, from managing the electronics and lighting in our homes to populating “smart grids” for water and electricity, helping monitor these and other systems to reduce waste.
In short, I do not share the view of many that, after the Internet and the personal computer, it will be a long wait until the next paradigm-shifting innovation. Artificial intelligence will provide the boost that keeps the teens rolling. So, despite a rough start from the financial crisis (which will still slow global growth this year and next), there is no reason why the new decade has to be an economic flop.
Barring another round of deep financial crises, it won’t be – as long as politicians do not stand in the way of the new paradigm of trade, technology, and artificial intelligence.
Kenneth Rogoff is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
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fonkytronks 04:18 05 Jan 10
Even the (current) internet hasn't changed human lifestyle quite like the way electricity did.
I expect AI, when it's really up and running, to have a bigger impact than electricity. It will change everything in our lives, most importantly - politics.
We'll be the first earth/darwin based species to "invent" it's evolutionary successor.
2 things to expect within 20 years in no particular order:
1 A.I.
2 Nuclear Fusion - i.e. get out of jail free energy.
s56a 01:35 08 Jan 10
I've been reading this AI optimistic forecast for ages. Chess is a closed world and computer algorithms supported with huge databases work well.
rainman 07:08 08 Jan 10
'..a closed world' you say. so is wall street and by extension arguably finance is a closed world with huge databases. food for thought.
mistergrinch 10:28 08 Jan 10
As a graduate student in computer science, I am working toward building an AI system for global control not unlike Skynet, with the ultimate goal of rendering humanity totally obsolete. Consider me a force of nature, a tool of evolution, or the hand of an evil god. The point is, humanity's global problems cannot be solved by humanity, but they may be solvable by post-humanity. For more thinking along these lines, see http://thesingularitarian.blogspot.com/2009/11/welcoming-rise-of-machines.html
utilitus 01:33 10 Jan 10
Prof. Rogoff sounds like he is a long-time carrier of a virus once endemic over at MIT, which may still lurk in the local circuitry, plumbing or particularly in the Kool-Aid once dispensed in their networked vending machines. AFAIK, that tainted flavor of Strong AI has been recalled (all according to the proper dynamics of the marketplace of ideas, of course), and the infection subdued, except on the remotest colonies on Planet Kurzweil_1 and in the left ventricles of the exceptionally nerdly everywhere else.
It's quite apt that, to fill the resulting hole in their broken robotic 'hearts', the World Wide Web Consortium is centered there at MIT, and that its' perhaps most important current project is the development of the Semantic Web, the standardization of the expression and use of networked language and data. Sure, such semantic consistency will facilitate all manner of fancy-pants inference and analysis beloved of our economist brethren, but its' essential virtue is its' elegantly simple methodology designed by proper software engineers, many of whom no doubt enjoy science fiction without believing it.
On another front, currently productive AI greats like Peter Norvig, key research scientist at Google, did his dissertation on Natural Language Processing. By predigesting damn near everything on the Web, Google can instantly produce likely meaningful answers, which if generated during the Turning Test would immediately shut the trial down. Nobody knows that much, that fast. As Ed Feigenbaum said of Expert Systems, "In the knowledge is the power". The range of solutions Prof. Rogoff regards as applications of AI are largely previously solved engineering problems awaiting application at a social scale. Problem is, America 'can't handle the truth' of honest, empirical efficiency in the face of rent seeking all dolled up as 'markets'.
Last March in the FT, Hank Paulson wrote about reforming the architecture of financial regulation, and I posted a reply snidely recommending the Panopticon, an architectural design for a prison Jeremy Bentham claimed would stabilize whole economies by using surveillance to deter crime. By standardizing the semantics and monitoring the processing of financial and economic data as it flows through all regulated institutions, a clearer, more intelligent model of the functioning of the body economic might take shape, leading, among many other things, to a cure for the social diseases rampant in the great knocking shop that is Wall Street.
Marc Laventurier
s56a 01:29 12 Jan 10
Rainman, there is no 9/11 in chess! Everything is well defined, just combinations are mind bogling. There are people involved in finances.
cheeheongquah 01:52 05 Jan 10
Hope that those computers depicted in Terminator do not rule mankind!
Chee-Heong Quah