Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 26

Rule of Law in the US and Abroad | RDI-National Constitution Center-Paideia | February 9, 2022

Tonight! https://t.co/qPHveEVYra

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) February 9, 2022

Learn more about this event at the Renew Democracy Initiative.

The National Constitution Center and Renew Democracy Initiative present a discussion exploring how the rule of law is protected in constitutional systems around the world—including the United States—and how to ensure its survival when threatened by modern challenges. What happens to constitutions when legal and political norms are violated, and how can we defend rule of law and ensure that our civic institutions remain strong? The panel will feature a unique set of perspectives, including both foreign dissidents who have risked their lives to fight for freedom in their home countries—Garry Kasparov, chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, and Judge Claudia Escobar, Guatemalan whistleblower and former magistrate of the Court of Appeals of Guatemala—and legal experts Robert P. George and Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.

Garry Kasparov on Putin’s Comments at Ukrainian President | CNN | February 9, 2022

“For Vladimir Putin–a Russian dictator–a democratic, successful Ukraine is a mortal threat to his power in Russia.”

Russian pro-democracy leader Garry Kasparov discusses Putin’s comments on Zelensky and Ukraine following a news conference earlier today. pic.twitter.com/8K5y3wiQ8i

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) February 9, 2022

 

Garry Kasparov Reacts to Russia Increasing Military Forces | MSNBC | February 8, 2022

.@kwelkernbc, @MattMcBradley, @Renew_Democracy‘s @Kasparov63, and Amb. Bill Taylor joined @SRuhle to discuss the stand-off in Ukraine as more Russian forces line Ukraine’s borders. “Russians could take the key to capital within 48 hours,” says Bradley.https://t.co/34prVmkG2h

— Stephanie Ruhle Reports (@RuhleOnMSNBC) February 8, 2022

To see the original clip, visit MSNBC.

HRF Hosts Rally Against Beijing 2022 | HRF | February 4, 2022

As I wrote in 2013 about Putin’s Sochi Games, dictatorships love hosting sporting spectacles to whitewash their regimes at home and abroad, going back to 1936. https://t.co/e79IkZ7mao https://t.co/I5aoaHeA26

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) February 4, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can see the original at the Human Rights Foundation.

“NEW YORK (February 4, 2022) — As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics kick off today, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) remains strongly committed to condemning the Chinese dictatorship’s attempt to whitewash its dismal human rights record, including the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur population. Yesterday, on the eve of the Games, HRF co-hosted a peaceful demonstration in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC to denounce the systematic human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and call attention to the complicity of corporate sponsors and the International Olympics Committee (IOC).

Speaking to an audience of journalists, leading activists, and nonprofit organizations, HRF Senior Strategy and Research Associate Jenny Wang delivered remarks underscoring the IOC’s lack of moral conscience, and emphasizing the importance of individuals living in democratic nations standing in solidarity with all those suffering under the CCP’s oppression.

“With its abysmal human rights record and history of broken promises, Beijing should never have been awarded the opportunity to host these Games,” said HRF Senior Strategy and Research Associate Jenny Wang. “Yet, time and time again, we have seen the appalling complicity of the IOC, and its refusal to stand on the right side of history.”

Additionally, HRF worked with exiled Chinese dissident artist and Havel Prize Laureate Badiucao to showcase his five-piece Beijing 2022 Collection, which was initially released at the 2021 Oslo Freedom Forum in Miami, along with three never-before-seen pieces evoking imagery of the iconic ‘Tank Man’ from the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, highlighting the Chinese government’s internet censorship, and portraying the impunity of police brutality.

Other co-hosts of the #NoBeijing2022 rally in DC included: Campaign for Uyghurs, ChinaAid, Dialogue China, Hong Kong Democracy Council, Hong Kong Watch, International Campaign for Tibet, Students for a Free Tibet, Uyghur American Association, Uyghur Human Rights Project, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and World Uyghur Congress.

Read HRF’s remarks here

Learn more here about Badiucao’s NFT project, first launched on February 1, featuring his Beijing 2022 Collection of five original works of art that depict the Chinese government’s oppression. Ten percent of proceeds will be donated to the Art in Protest Residency program, a collaboration between HRF and the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Read HRF’s report, 100 Years of Suppression: The CCP’s Strategies in Tibet, the Uyghur Region, and Hong Kong, to learn more about the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government.

Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. For interview requests of further comment, please e-mail media@hrf.org.”

Who is Garry Kasparov? | Final Jeopardy | February 2, 2022

“Who am I?” https://t.co/XCifOnoiLp

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) February 4, 2022

Garry Kasparov on Russia-Ukraine Tensions | Washington Journal/CSPAN | February 1, 2022

TUES| Renew Democracy Initiative Chairman Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) discusses Russia & Ukraine tensions.

Read his take on President Putin: https://t.co/12nqAVLvo5

Watch live tomorrow at 8:00am ET! pic.twitter.com/YSMiqmqeu3

— Washington Journal (@cspanwj) January 31, 2022

You can see the original clip at CSPAN.

Putin critic says the Russian leader is playing poker – and he’s bluffing | CNN | January 30, 2022

This is the underlying issue with how democracies so often fail to deal with dictators and demagogues, abroad and at home. There’s no good faith, just pure self-interest. They advance until stopped. https://t.co/GCs9kJHIie

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) January 30, 2022

You can see the original clip via CNN.

Kasparov: The Disruption We Need | Appian Blog | January 31, 2022

As orgs move past traditional solutions in tech to advance their business during the pandemic, one thing is clear: the way they operate today has been forever changed.

Get the full story from Former Grand Chess Champion @kasparov63 here: https://t.co/77PVzTN8Od#lowcode #AI pic.twitter.com/ERLUTPWbCY

— Appian (@Appian) February 3, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can see the original at Appian.

“Despite the challenges of the past two years, I’ve been speaking regularly on AI and the future of the human-machine relationship. Often I’ve done it thanks only to some of those machines, using remote tech that was previously seen as a gimmick, a convenience, or an annoyance.

When pushed by a crisis, it’s remarkable what we can accomplish. The old saying that “necessity is the mother of invention” also applies to inventions that already existed but weren’t considered necessities. Suddenly, when need arises, the barriers turn out to have been artificial, temporary, even psychological.

The modern city is defined by skyscrapers, amazing monuments to our mastery over concrete and steel. But they wouldn’t be practical without elevators! And for decades, every elevator had an operator, so many of them that their union in New York City was 17,000 strong in 1920. This may sound reasonable, as early elevators could be quite complicated and operators knew how to keep the sensitive machinery running well.

But I learned something surprising when I was invited to speak to the Otis Elevator Company in Connecticut in 2006. The technology for automatic elevators had existed since 1900, but people were too uncomfortable to ride in one without an operator. It took the 1945 operators strike (a crisis, if a small one) and an industry PR push to change people’s minds, a process that is today repeating with driverless cars and other automated technology. The cycle of automation, discomfort, acceptance, and, steadily, massive gains in productivity and living standards goes on.

While a few jobs like elevator operator are destined to be trivially automated and made redundant, most are modernized, integrated with powerful new tools. Artists weren’t put out of work by digital art; they were given tremendous new scope for their creativity. Musicians eventually embraced synthesizers (pioneered by the remarkable Ray Kurzweil, better known in AI circles for his books and theory of the singularity), and drum machines still need musicians to turn their sounds into songs.

Returning to my recent lectures, in several I found myself defending the critical role of humans in a world obsessed with the latest technology. At a cybersecurity conference in Israel, the described billions of threats per second could only be met by AI that could keep pace. The bad guys also used AI to adapt and generate new threats, of course, in an endless cycle.

But machines aren’t bad or good, they are tools, tools used by humans. A big drop in cyberattacks occur not when the firewalls and other defenses get good enough, but when the hackers are tracked and arrested! That’s a negative example of the human element, to be sure, but the moral of the story applies as well to the good guys trying to use tech to make our work easier, our companies more profitable, and our lives better. They succeed when they center the human element, as well as the human experience in the outcome.

This isn’t only important for attracting and keeping talent to your company, although that’s a good thing to remember. There are concrete, bottom-line reasons to embrace tools that make human-machine collaboration easier and more powerful. There simply aren’t enough high-level coders to meet demand.

A recent IT industry report marked several unmistakable trends in IT, all exacerbated by the pandemic that has put an urgent emphasis on the ability of companies to adapt quickly. First, that developers are in the highest demand ever. Second, that a majority of software projects are being delivered behind schedule. Third, costs of development are rising relative to other costs.

When such a perfect storm is brewing, you have to look past traditional solutions and find new frameworks. In 2006, I was invited to speak in Vienna at an event honoring great mathematician Kurt Gödel on the 100th anniversary of his birth. (Many assume that chessplayers are all gifted in mathematics, but I assure you that in my school years I much preferred history and literature, a tendency that continues today!)

I did not attempt to fool a room full of experts with comparisons between chess and Gödel’s famous theories of mathematical incompleteness. On a very superficial level there exist some analogies, since I believe there are always true things in chess that cannot be conclusively proven. And while it’s a stretch to apply his statements about mathematics to other endeavors, I believe one in particular applies very well to other areas. To paraphrase, Gödel wrote that every system will contain a problem that cannot be solved from within the system itself.

That is, it’s vital to not just look around, to look for solutions within the system, but to step back and look above, to look outside of the system where the problem was created. Hiring more coders, for example, is the standard systemic solution to development slowdowns. And recruiting and hiring better ones, competing to the sky against other companies in the same dilemma.

The supply of expert coders cannot be increased easily or quickly, so the answer must come from the other direction, from a different framework: making tools that don’t require expert coding proficiency but that can still solve the problems. As Ray Kurzweil said when critics of his music synthesizer complained, “But now anybody can make music!” “Yes, exactly!”

Study after study has shown that industries with more technological disruption do better, not worse. They hire more people, not fewer. Their employees are better paid and enjoy their work more than in industries insulated from tech, including AI automation.

The reason is obvious to any follower of economists like Joseph Schumpeter, the prophet of what he called creative destruction. The “deliberate dismantling of established processes to make way for improved methods of production” is always a big and necessary boost to the economy, from the railroads to Henry Ford’s assembly line to the internet. And it’s not just GDP, but real workers, people, let’s not forget, who are freed from routine work better done by machines.

This is not to be callous. AI automation and rapid change will not have only winners—no change ever does. A key goal to make the most winners, to share the benefits broadly. The more we can democratize technology to include the widest breadth of humanity, the more the gains will be shared. To put on my human rights advocate hat for a moment, this goal is as important to me as any bottom line. The good news is that they can be connected, not opposed, if we keep centering people and how tech effects them.

Tech that puts power into more hands, into more diverse environments, and empowers people of different ages, backgrounds, and talents, is the best kind of technology. What we must remember, always, is that we make those choices.

As AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum wrote, “Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation.”

If we want the right things, if we make the right choices, we will use these powerful new tools to reach our dreams as well as our budgets!

In the last two years, some companies have had to move past traditional solutions to scale or automate tasks while others adopted advanced technologies just to stay afloat. One thing is certain: the way companies operate today has been forever changed. For more on technology’s role in business advancement, read Grand Chess Champion Garry Kasparov’s thoughts here:

As orgs move past traditional solutions in tech to advance their business during the pandemic, one thing is certain: the way they operate today has been forever changed.

To learn more about Garry Kasparov’s thoughts on all things low-code and key trends in the technology space, head to his inaugural blog, “The Real World AI Experiment”.”

Garry Kasparov on What Will Take Putin Down | The Daily Beast | January 30, 2022

On this bonus episode of @NewAbnormalPod, @Kasparov63— one of the great strategists and a longtime critic of Putin—shares the “moves” he thinks are needed to checkmate Putin once and for all and how Biden’s presidency is part of the endgame https://t.co/3xNpUOTWjt

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) January 30, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can see the original at The Daily Beast.

“It’s no secret what keeps Russian President Vladimir Putin in power. As Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov puts it, “he controls directly, indirectly more money than any other individual in human history.”

Kasparov is one of the great strategists and a longtime critic of Putin, so naturally, we asked him how he thinks the current crisis in Ukraine and Vlad’s stronghold on Russia will end.

In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, he shares the “moves” he thinks are needed to checkmate Putin once and for all—and how Biden’s presidency is part of the endgame.”

Garry Kasparov: “Putin is playing poker. He’s bluffing.” | MSNBC | January 29, 2022

Threats of what the US will do IF Putin invades Ukraine again are a waste of time. He’s sure he can endure more sanctions because they take time and bureaucracy. Who knows, maybe his pal Trump will come back and take his side, as Tucker Carlson recommends. https://t.co/p1HQFZ1L5K

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) January 29, 2022

You can see the original clip at MSNBC.