Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 39

Trump is weakening America’s immune system | CNN.COM | Op-ed | April 20, 2020

by Garry Kasparov

PLEASE READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT CNN.COM 

When, in 2016, I referred to Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primary as a symptom of an unhealthy American political system, I couldn’t have known how such medical metaphors would sound today. But more than three years into his presidency, Trump — facing an unprecedented crisis in the form of a deadly pandemic — has shown himself to be a dangerous pathogen.

Trump has spent his time in office weakening the nation’s systemic immune system — or institutions that hold him in check — and setting the US up for a disaster when those institutions are needed more than ever. All autocrats and would-be autocrats have the narcissistic superpower of thinking only of themselves. While normal people are worried about the cost in human lives or the economic impact of a crisis, an autocrat races to exploit it to his personal advantage.

This ability to focus only on power, to consider actions that shock everyone else, is how would-be autocrats become actual autocrats. Russians, myself included, underestimated the extremes Vladimir Putin would go to retain power. By the time we began ringing the alarm bells, the levers to stop him had been removed from the political machine. The Russian opposition and the international community had wasted precious time fretting over Putin’s power grabs, surprised at every turn by his ruthlessness. We said, “Surely he would never…,” and “Doesn’t he realize how bad it looks?” But people like Putin don’t care about traditions or what others have never done before. They don’t care how it looks. They only care if it works — for them. They don’t ask why; they only ask why not.

This is how emergency powers become permanent and unsavory alliances of convenience become the new status quo. A crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic is a deadly example of how this process works and it has plenty of predecessors, including the war on terror. There is a rising number of democratically elected leaders in the world transforming themselves into authoritarians — just look at Hungary’s Viktor Orban.


These abuses can happen in democracies far more robust than Russia’s, or even Hungary’s. In the US, Republicans are coming out against voting by mail in the 2020 presidential election because they see voter turnout as a threat. This is a battle that has gone on in state legislatures and courts for years, usually via baseless allegations of fraud. But an autocratic mentality would instead look at the direct method of shutting down or sabotaging the US Postal Service.
Why not? An autocrat’s only calculation is how it would impact his election chances, not who gets harmed in the process.

And if you’re hoping members of the GOP will push back against Trump’s tyrannical illusions, look only at their spinelessness as he claimed “total authority” last Monday, before saying state governors were responsible for reopening the economy.
Trump covets authority without responsibility, the creed of every strongman. To use the golfing language he understands, such contradictions are par for Trump’s course, as when he now claims that he always knew about the pandemic when in fact he spent weeks saying no one could have seen it coming. Well, which is it? Did Trump know and do almost nothing, or was he oblivious despite the experts’ many warnings?



It also appears Trump is using crucial medical supplies and federal small business aid for political purposes. He is inciting a culture war that sounds almost like a civil war with unhinged tweets about “liberating” states under lockdown — only ones with Democratic governors, of course. It’s shocking stuff, but Trump would probably consider anyone in his position an idiot for not doing such things. He already survived impeachment and knows that he will only face the consequences of his actions if he loses in November. If he wins, today’s behavior will look like the golden days. He’ll have four years of unthreatened executive powers to expand his abuses and cover his tracks. But until election night, he’s desperate and capable of anything.

Joe Biden, the Democrats and everyone else who wants to prevent Trump’s second term must focus on the facts instead of being drawn into a circus where Trump is the ringmaster. He can and will generate a new scandal every day, so it’s vital to provide a consistent and clear leadership alternative. It’s equally essential for the media to cover that alternative instead of hanging on Trump’s every utterance.

The opposition must also avoid unforced errors, such as defending China and WHO’s actions at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak just because Trump is attacking them. There are countless areas to criticize Trump on the merits, so why do it on one of the few things he’s right about? Of course, Trump is only attacking China and the WHO to distract from his own massive failures in responding to the pandemic, but it doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Trump’s opponents shouldn’t do him a favor by defending an institution that is dysfunctional and compromised.



Trump is the world’s worst firefighter, but China was the arsonist, and the WHO’s deferential stance towards China’s response to the outbreak likely had deadly consequences for the world. All pressure should be brought to bear so they clean house, something that WHO’s main sponsors, the US and Bill Gates’s foundation, could do with a coherent strategy. Unfortunately, Trump isn’t capable of such leadership, and Gates appears more interested defending the organization than in cleaning it up. If he stopped writing checks and emails and demanded a WHO leadership slate free of Chinese control, he could save far more lives.

Autocrats are good at identifying problems that can bring them power. They are terrible at solutions — not that they really care about those anyway once they are in charge. As 2016 showed, a candidate who offers bad solutions still has an advantage over candidates who deny there’s a problem. The Democrats need to focus on providing better solutions — real ones — before it happens again.


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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

 

 

The Global Hack: Garry Kasparov answering your questions | April 9, 2020

What is The Global Hack

THE GLOBAL HACK·WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020·

“What the coronavirus has revealed, again, about our president” | NYDailyNews |

by Garry Kasparov
Trump and the authoritarianism virus: What the coronavirus has revealed, again, about our president

Many of what we call natural disasters are largely man-made. Modern famines, for example, may be sparked by crop disease or drought, but war and politics turn agriculture and weather into mass-casualty events. Even the hurricanes and earthquakes that exemplify the expression “an act of God” usually determine their human toll based on how well we are prepared and how well we respond.

In a crisis, we rely on government to take broader actions for the greater good, to allocate resources and compose regulations, and to enforce them as needed. In a democracy, this requires trust, a belief that our representatives and leaders know best and are looking out for us.

In authoritarian states like China, Iran and Russia, trust is replaced with coercion, quite a different model. It’s the difference between “Do what we say because we know what’s good for you” and “Do what we say if you know what’s good for you.” The key difference is that democracies fail in a crisis when the system doesn’t work. Dictatorships fail when it does.

China’s authoritarian Communist regime responded to the outbreak in Wuhan just like dictatorships always do: denying the facts, cracking down on anyone telling the truth and shifting blame. In fact, this is how dictatorships do everything, not just crisis management, but in a disaster it has especially deadly consequences.

Information is essential in a public emergency. What do to and why, where to go and how to get there. A dictatorship will only provide information that benefits itself. Functionaries and officials will act to preserve their power and push away any responsibility.

COVID-19 got the boost it needed from the Chinese regime’s response in the crucial early days when it could have been contained. They lied to their own people, lied to the world, censored mention of the outbreak, and jailed doctors for speaking out. By the time they took broad containment measures, millions of people had fled the city, taking the virus with them. That’s the real “Chinese model,” not the subsequent lockdown.

We may never know exactly how the novel coronavirus ravaging the world got its start in Wuhan. Fighting the pandemic does not leave much time for other lines of thought. While you do not blame firefighters for always being at the scene of fires, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention was researching these lethal combinations.

The deadly potential of viruses borne in bats making their way to humans via other mammals was already well-established, partly thanks to research done in Wuhan and North Carolina years ago, which included synthesizing such viruses as proof of concept. (The American efforts were shut down when the U.S. government banned funding such risky experiments in 2014.) There were also documented cases of weak safety practices at the Wuhan center. This isn’t proof that COVID-19 escaped a lab, not a market, but it’s more than enough to keep the possibility open instead of shouting “xenophobia!” when these facts are presented.

Getting to the bottom of this is important not merely for assigning blame — there will be plenty of that to go around — but so that we can learn lessons going forward. If we cannot trust anything the Chinese regime said at the start, how can we base our actions on what they say now? We don’t know how much of the medical data coming out China is accurate even today. Relying on it in any way is foolish and dangerous, the equivalent of relying on the faulty tests and equipment China has been sending out as part of its propaganda push in the wake of the virus’s deadly spread.

Nor can we put blind faith in international institutions like the World Health Organization. While I do not doubt the expertise of their doctors, like so many such groups, from the United Nations to Interpol to the International Olympic Committee, many in leadership have been compromised by China and other authoritarian regimes that see these organizations as useful geopolitical tools. One WHO official abruptly ended an interview when asked about Taiwan’s response to COVID-19, lest he offend China.

China has become a reliable and, lamentably, essential factory for the free world, but this entire episode is a reminder that dictatorships can never be trusted. Regimes that do not value the freedom and lives of their own people cannot be expected to value the lives of people in other nations. The U.S. and the rest of the free world have become dependent on brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia and China, giving them leverage they have no qualms against using. That’s a lesson for next time, instead of idly hoping to go back to the status quo when the status quo is what got us here.

Meanwhile, the trust-based system of the free world is failing under pressure. After three years of President Trump’s constant lies and extreme political polarization in the United States, the only people who believe anything Trump says do so mainly to spite their political enemies. This is a catastrophic scenario when coherent action is required for the greater good. A united appeal to science and citizenship could have saved lives, but such unity is unimaginable in Washington today. The poison of hyper-partisanship kills as surely as any virus.

Instead of listening to the U.S. intelligence reports and heeding the experts’ warnings, Trump maintained his usual bluster for critical weeks, as if insulting the virus could bluff it away. This is the same tactic used by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and other autocrats eager to look tough in the face of a challenge, with similarly dismal results against the disease.

Another parallel is how Trump pushes off all responsibility onto governors, despite years of “only I can fix it” rhetoric. Putin has practically disappeared as casualties mount in Russia, handing duties — and blame, he hopes — off to the Moscow mayor and others. Autocrats don’t do bad news; they must appear infallible.

Trump enjoys starring in daily COVID-19 press conferences, embracing his role as misinformer-in-chief, giving out erroneous information and praising himself while chastising the media and state leaders.

He finally realized that millions of dead Americans might hurt his reelection chances, but the damage was done. It’s been compounded by another autocratic tendency in the Trump administration, incompetence and nepotism. Trump has spent three years surrounding himself with advisers whose only qualification is their unquestioning loyalty to him. This leads to tragi-comic blunders like the U.S. calling Thailand to ask for medical supplies only to be told that Thailand was expecting a shipment of medical supplies from the United States!

More tragic and less comic was watching Jared Kushner give a briefing on the pandemic Thursday evening. Thousands of Americans are dead, the world’s greatest experts are available, and the president’s son-in-law is lecturing us based on what he read on Wikipedia and Facebook that morning. Now the U.S. Navy is firing captains for warning about the spread of COVID-19 on their ships. Perhaps next for the administration is the “Turkmenistan model” of simply banning the use of the word “coronavirus.”

Incompetence is deadly enough on its own, but malice and corruption are never far behind in this administration. Trump has been waging war on American institutions and looking for ways to enrich himself and his cronies from the start, and this crisis will only open up more opportunities.

Avast Blog: Authoritarianism Goes Viral | April 7, 2020

READ ORIGINAL POST AT AVAST BLOG

In the midst of a global pandemic, all governments are tasked with caring for their citizens. How does this change for those under authoritarian regimes?

A crisis brings out the worst in some people and the best in others. This is also true, I would say, of companies and even countries. Companies and countries are composed of people, of course, but I’m referring here to their leadership, or regimes, and how they respond to challenges to bring out their best—or to do their worst.

And how do the people respond? In authoritarian regimes, where the people have an adversarial relationship with the government, there is little faith that the government wants to protect them when disaster strikes. In fact, it’s often the opposite, with the regime always seeking to exploit a genuine emergency to expand its repressive powers.

In the free world, we want to trust our government in a crisis. Even if we didn’t vote for the local mayor or the president, they are supposed to work for us. Officials are answerable to the people, so we hope, and despite the sluggishness and messiness of parties and politics, there is respect for the good of the public and accountability if there isn’t.

Even if you’re lucky enough to be able to trust your government to have your best interests in mind, that doesn’t absolve you of your personal obligations. Isn’t that what living in a democracy is all about, having choices and responsibilities? There are laws and rules aplenty, but free citizens aren’t slaves, and a degree of mutual trust is required between the governors and the governed.

The parallels between computer viruses and human ones are perhaps a little too neat, but it’s a useful metaphor. In both cases we rely on authorities for information and guidance, and to write and enforce regulations that protect us from harm. And the more individuals follow the best practices, the higher degree of community safety we can achieve. Through it all, whether we are defending our bodies from microbes or our computers from hackers, we strive for a balance of freedom and safety.

This careful dance has no stage in a dictatorship. The only safety they care about is that of their own power and money, and you can be sure they will be quick to use any crisis to increase both if possible. Here, too, there are parallels, because bad actors of every kind are always looking to exploit a crisis. There is already a wave of scams and phishing attacks with content about the coronavirus sweeping the globe. Fake testing kits are being sold online and worthless miracle cures are making the rounds on social media. Desperate people are often easy targets.

That’s also true when they are the targets of unscrupulous regimes. Iran has seen a terrible surge of the coronavirus, but the app they released to collect information about the spread of the disease was also collecting far more personal information than it needed and was removed from the Google Play store. The same group has developed other shady apps for Iranian government, insecure messaging apps designed to supplant popular ones that have encryption the government has trouble breaking in order to spy on its citizens.

Like fighting fake news, you can fight against malicious apps by relying on trusted sources. Installing something sent to you by SMS or a social media site is much more likely to be untrustworthy. If you have any doubts, first try to get the same service or information from a website instead of installing an app that could access a huge amount of sensitive private information.

READ ORIGINAL POST AT AVAST BLOG

Russia was slow to take serious coronavirus safety measures, but quick to boast the opposite, leaving a huge trust gap in what is the real state of things in the country. The Kremlin banned public gatherings of large groups, which would conveniently include anti-government protests, but allowed football stadiums to fill and even a chess event with over thousand guests as late as March 16.

Officially, COVID-19 numbers in Russia were low, and the Kremlin boasted about the success of their preventative measures and testing. I assumed at the start that their numbers were made up because that is what authoritarian regimes always do—control information to twist reality. But reality has a way of breaking through these facades, as it did in Wuhan, and now Russia is on lockdown like nearly everywhere else. The regime’s weeks of denial and propaganda will cost many lives, and not just Russian ones. For far too long, flights from Russia weren’t banned or scanned like those from many places with worse official statistics.

Data is a powerful weapon in the fight against an invisible disease. Connected thermometers can detect a regional outbreak faster than a hospital. GPS history analytics can track an infected person’s whereabouts and everywhere they’ve been, even warning everyone they passed by on the street. Those things are already happening in some places. What about an app that sends you an alert when you’re moving around too much, or not implementing social distancing? We naturally tend to let down our guard about privacy issues when there are matters of life and death, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them.

Autocrats are already exploiting the virus to grab more power. Hungary has suspended parliament and elections. Turkey and Brazil are cracking down even more on journalists and activists, claiming necessity and security. Regional officials are pushing back, but it’s clear that democracy is under pressure with the virus as an excuse. And don’t think that more robust democracies aren’t experiencing such pressures. President Trump has abused his authority many times, if often limited by the courts and Congress. Will they be able to resist him in a state of emergency, when the tendency is to let the executive do whatever they say is necessary, and for the people to rally around the leadership?

Power that is given to the government in an emergency is rarely returned without a fight. And remember that old saying about good intentions and where that road so often leads. We must trust our governments to do what is needed and we must hope that they also do what is right. But as Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.” It is our duty as citizens to stay involved, even in a crisis—especially in a crisis—and to ensure that government officials’ actions in a crisis are to help everyone, not just themselves, and that emergency powers end with the emergency.

“Russia claims it has covid-19 under control. The facade is cracking.” | Washington Post | March 29, 2020

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT WASHINGTON POST 

by Garry Kasparov

March 29, 2020

With most of Europe and the United States shutting down to slow the coronavirus pandemic’s advance, it was surprising in recent weeks to hear that Russia had apparently dodged covid-19 almost entirely. Maps of the outbreak drew a suspiciously tidy ring around the largest nation on Earth, as if Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had simply banned the virus like he has free speech and opposition candidates.

It seemed an unlikely miracle. Russia’s risk factors include a health-care system that is creaky at best outside of the affluent city centers; countless international travelers; a large migrant labor force; and a 2,600-mile border with China, where the virus originated. While covid-19 was filling European hospitals, Russia was still filling soccer stadiums with fans and, in one case, the opening ceremony of a chess event in a theater with more than a thousand people.

Yet the official Kremlin line, parroted to varying degrees by every Russian news outlet, was that rapid testing and travel restrictions had turned the country into a citadel. Reports on Russia’s success were also spread by the international media with only marginally greater skepticism — despite having spent the past three years reporting on Moscow’s ability to blanket the world with lies.

The Kremlin could fudge the coronavirus numbers, tout its response on state-run media and censor social media posts exposing a mounting crisis, but ultimately — just as China discovered — the government could not spin a relentless virus.

In the past few days, the Russian facade has begun to crack. Reports of overloaded hospitals are emerging, Moscow’s mayor said the official numbers were wrong, and Putin made one of his ritual photo-ops at a hospital in full protective gear, finally acknowledging the crisis. If the Trump administration’s example is anything to go by, months of ignoring and distorting reality will almost certainly make the consequences in Russia far worse.

It is remarkable that anyone ever took Russia’s coronavirus numbers at face value. Like most dictatorships, Putin’s regime lies constantly, even when it doesn’t have to. Authoritarian regimes are obsessed with information control, especially when there is news that could make them look weak. No appearance of vulnerability can be permitted, otherwise the people might start getting dangerous ideas.

Then there is Putin’s track record in the specific realm of health and epidemics. HIV officially barely exists in Russia, where it is still wrongly considered a “gay disease,” and where the LGBTQ community is a persecuted minority. Activist groups trying to track HIV and educate about it are harassed and shut down. Unsurprisingly, Russia is one of the few places where HIV cases are increasing.

Putin’s coronavirus malpractice isn’t just the latest misery visited upon the Russian people; he also endangers the rest of the world. Remember the lessons of Chernobyl. The toxic nuclear cloud that the Soviet authorities pretended didn’t exist until it was over Sweden did not stop at the Soviet border. The artificially low coronavirus numbers kept Russia off most flight ban and mandatory quarantine lists as the pandemic spread, with hundreds of flights going in and out of the country.

The human cost would be beside the point to Putin, who cares only about sending the message that he is strong and in control. If you think that description also applies to President Trump’s recent news conferences, you wouldn’t be wrong. Trump’s tendency to echo autocratic rhetoric is well-established, and the pandemic is no exception. Having wasted precious weeks minimizing the threat, now Trump and his acolytes have started a drumbeat about returning to normal life by Easter — April 12! — in a rhetorical campaign that demands the false and immoral choice between saving lives and restoring economic growth.

Trump’s callousness about potential victims of the pandemic has been jarring, even by this president’s standards. A crisis means difficult choices, impossible decisions that must still be made. But valuing every life — including the elderly, the weak, the vulnerable — is one of the signal traits that distinguish democracies from dictatorships.

Many of the core elements of democracy are already under pressure from the virus itself. Public gatherings, including some elections, have been suspended. Privacy is readily abandoned for tracking apps that can help control the spread. Even the social media platforms that routinely tolerate offensive speech and foreign propaganda have moved quickly to take down misinformation about covid-19. Worthwhile measures in the short term could be used for bad ends in the wrong hands.

The pandemic will leave its mark, changing the world in ways big and small; we must unite to determine the kind of society we want to live in on the other side of it. While we battle to stop the virus from destroying our bodies, we must also hold dearly to our souls. America will outlast the coronavirus despite Trump, and it doesn’t have to become like him to do it.

“The Talks” Interview | March 11, 2020

MARCH 11, 2020

by EMMA ROBERTSON

LISTEN TO AUDIO EXCERPT

READ ORIGINAL AT THE TALKS

Mr. Kasparov, during your reign as a chess grandmaster, you were known and feared for your pre-game preparation and extensive study of your opponent’s dynamics. Is preparation the key to success in chess?

Preparation is key to success anywhere! I wouldn’t separate chess from other intellectual activities because preparation means that you’re analyzing the available data, that you understand your opponent, that you understand the framework of the game… And then you try to create conditions for the battle on the most favorable terms for you. When you have two top players, the result most likely depends on making sure that you play the game on your terms.

You started playing chess professionally in the 1980s — how did you go about finding that kind of crucial information without the help of the Internet?

You’re right that in my hey days, we didn’t have access to so much data. There was still preparation, you could still prepare for the games, you could collect games from magazines, you could learn about your opponents and about new opening moves… But the information travelled slow! Chess was always very popular in Russia, in Yugoslavia, and in Serbo-Croatia, and 50 years ago many players in the free world complained that they couldn’t read Russian magazines. They would sometimes even learn to read Russian just to make sure they had access to this data.

“You needed to be disciplined outside of the board, to make sure that the rest of your life did not hurt your ability to prepare for the most important matches.”

Why was chess so popular in Russia?

It was popular in Russia — in the Soviet Union, let’s be more specific — and around the socialist communist countries for a simple reason: it was viewed as the very important ideological weapon to demonstrate intellectual superiority of the communist regime over the decadent West. I’m the last person to complain because I benefitted from these programs where huge numbers of kids were introduced to chess and were supported by well-developed state systems. Still, you needed to be disciplined outside of the board, you needed to make sure that the rest of your life and activities did not hurt your ability to prepare for the most important matches.

Was it hard to keep up that pace, or did you enjoy doing it because you wanted to win?

Oh, for me it was not the challenge! I enjoyed it. And I always object to the people who say, “Oh, this person is not so talented but he or she is a hard worker.” I think working hard is a part of your talent, it’s an indispensable part of your success. And that’s what separates good players from great players.

So you couldn’t become a chess world champion on the basis of natural talent alone?

No. You can go far enough — but preparation is just part of every player. Some players are already starting their career at age seven or eight. We have some great young talents at age 10, 11, 12 and they already possess information about the game of chess, far superior to anything that [American chess champion] Bobby Fischer had 50 years ago, or even that I had 25 years ago.

Would you say that you need to be smart in order to excel in chess?

I mean, sure, you have to be smart to play chess. You have to be smart to play any game, poker, whatever. Great minds like Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test, believed that chess was the key to reveal the secret of human intelligence… But what I know about chess is that having an aptitude for chess is nothing but aptitude for chess. If you’re good at poker, you’re also good at math, you know how to make bets… But chess doesn’t make you good or bad at anything else.

So what does make a great chess player? Maybe confidence or a kind of charisma that makes for a good show?

Sure, charisma never hurts with the press but at the end of the day, if you play chess, character is most important. I was world champion for 15 years. I was the top rated player in the world for 20 years. It was really a very long reign, and during this time, there were two thoughts that I had: one was that I knew that I had to stop playing chess at the point where I felt I could not make any more difference. It’s not just about winning, but also about making a difference. So what else I could contribute to the game of chess by winning these game? And at certain point I realized, that’s it and I moved on. The second thought was that if you stay on top, you have to remember that success is the greatest enemy of future success.

Because you can easily become complacent.

Right, or you could lose your ability to be critical in analyzing your own games. I was relentless in analyzing my own games and criticizing myself, even just condemning myself for making mistakes, wrong decisions. It’s all about reinventing yourself. And during that time, I had to cope with all kinds of changes, even when chess underwent this revolution of having computers involved… So that probably tells you that I had a combination of those qualities that helped me to stay on top.

How did that technological revolution impact the game of chess?

Okay, when I played Anatoly Karpov in 1985, for example, we played the matches, but then the next day, they’re gone, they’ve disappeared. I could take a risk in 1985 because I could play an opening even if I was not sure 100% it was correct — but it could be a surprise. Now this attitude has simply been eliminated because you have machines, you have computers, you just push the button and find out any information you need. There’s no more room for bluffs. Technology changed our ability to prepare for the game.

“You have to be more creative now. You have to upgrade your ammunition almost on a daily basis.”

You seem to have adapted well — you were the first chess player to start using a computer for your pre-game study, and you famously played a few games against an early IBM computer called Deep Blue in 1996.

The games against the IBM computer, I played with a blindfold because I had no information about Deep Blue, its past games and plays weren’t made available for me. I had to adjust to playing against an opponent that was not very sensitive to any psychological warfare. So the importance of preparation was really demonstrated… After that first match, what I learned was, well, if you can’t beat them join them! I was the first one to use a chess database as well as a computer for my at-home preparation. And now today, you cannot imagine! Every important game played in any corner of the world of chess is known, it goes right on the Internet. Some people say it kills creativity. My view is the opposite! It enhances creativity because you have to be more creative now. You have to upgrade your ammunition almost on a daily basis.

Does this continuing rise of technology concern or worry you?

Look, today, the difference between a chess engine that you can buy and install your computer, and Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion, is about the same as the difference between Usain Bolt and a Ferrari. There’s no way you can compete against these machines, and I think it’s actually quite amazing! We should look for humans working with machines rather than fighting them. For now, machines still need humans, and soon we will be playing the role of shepherds, nudging the flocks of intelligent algorithms in the right direction. But I think the outcome is inevitable: machines are always getting better, and at some point eventually they will dominate.

 

Garry Kasparov Has Made Peace With AI | Wired | Feb 21st, 2020

Garry Kasparov is perhaps the greatest chess player in history. For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, he dominated the game with a ferocious style of play and an equally ferocious swagger.

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT WIRED.COM

Outside the chess world, however, Kasparov is best known for losing to a machine. In 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed and cowed by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. The loss sent shock waves across the world, and seemed to herald a new era of machine mastery over man.

The years since have put things into perspective. Personal computers have grown vastly more powerful, with smartphones now capable of running chess engines as powerful as Deep Blue alongside other apps. More significantly, thanks to recent progress in artificial intelligence, machines are learning and exploring the game for themselves.

Garry Kasparov: I’ve made my peace with it. At the end of the day, the match was not a curse but a blessing, because I was a part of something very important. Twenty-two years ago, I would have thought differently. But things happen. We all make mistakes. We lose. What’s important is how we deal with our mistakes, with negative experience.

1997 was an unpleasant experience, but it helped me understand the future of human-machine collaboration. We thought we were unbeatable, at chess, Go, shogi. All these games, they have been gradually pushed to the side [by increasingly powerful AI programs]. But it doesn’t mean that life is over. We have to find out how we can turn it to our advantage.

I always say I was the first knowledge worker whose job was threatened by a machine. But that helps me to communicate a message back to the public. Because, you know, nobody can suspect me of being pro-computers.

What message do you want to give people about the impact of AI?

I think it’s important that people recognize the element of inevitability. When I hear outcry that AI is rushing in and destroying our lives, that it’s so fast, I say no, no, it’s too slow.

Every technology destroys jobs before creating jobs. When you look at the statistics, only 4 percent of jobs in the US require human creativity. That means 96 percent of jobs, I call them zombie jobs. They’re dead, they just don’t know it.

For several decades we have been training people to act like computers, and now we are complaining that these jobs are in danger. Of course they are. We have to look for opportunities to create jobs that will emphasize our strengths. Technology is the main reason why so many of us are still alive to complain about technology. It’s a coin with two sides. I think it’s important that, instead of complaining, we look at how we can move forward faster.

When these jobs start disappearing, we need new industries, we need to build foundations that will help. Maybe it’s universal basic income, but we need to create a financial cushion for those who are left behind. Right now it’s a very defensive reaction, whether it comes from the general public or from big CEOs who are looking at AI and saying it can improve the bottom line but it’s a black box. I think it’s we still struggling to understand how AI will fit in.

A lot of people will have to contend with AI taking over some part of their jobs. What advice do you have for them?

There are different machines, and it is the role of a human and understand exactly what this machine will need to do its best. At the end of the day it’s about combination. For instance, look at radiology. If you have a powerful AI system, I’d rather have an experienced nurse than a top-notch professor [use it]. A person with decent knowledge will understand that he or she must add only a little bit. But a big star in medicine will like to challenge the machines, and that destroys the communication.

People ask me, “What can you do to assist another chess engine against AlphaZero?” I can look at AlphaZero’s games and understand the potential weaknesses. And I believe it has made some inaccurate evaluations, which is natural. For example, it values bishop over knight. It sees over 60 million games that statistically, you know, the bishop was dominant in many more games. So I think it added too much advantage to bishop in terms of numbers. So what you should do, you should try to get your engine to a position where AlphaZero will make inevitable mistakes [based on this inaccuracy].

“Technology is the main reason why so many of us are still alive to complain about technology.”GARRY KASPAROV

I often use this example. Imagine you have a very powerful gun, a rifle that can shoot a target 1 mile from where you are. Now a 1-millimeter change in the direction could end up with a 10-meter difference a mile away. Because the gun is so powerful, a tiny shift can actually make a big difference. And that’s the future of human-machine collaboration.

With AlphaZero and future machines, I describe the human role as being shepherds. You just have to nudge the flock of intelligent algorithms. Just basically push them in one direction or another, and they will do the rest of the job. You put the right machine in the right space to do the right task.

How much progress do you think we’ve made toward human-level AI?

We don’t know exactly what intelligence is. Even the best computer experts, the people on the cutting edge of computer science, they still have doubts about exactly what we’re doing.

What we understand today is AI is still a tool. We are comfortable with machines making us faster and stronger, but smarter? It’s some sort of human fear. At the same time, what’s the difference? We have always invented machines that help us to augment different qualities. And I think AI is just a great tool to achieve something that was impossible 10, 20 years ago.

How it will develop I don’t know. But I don’t believe in AGI [artificial general intelligence]. I don’t believe that machines are capable of transferring knowledge from one open-ended system to another. So machines will be dominant in the closed systems, whether it’s games, or any other world designed by humans.

David Silver [the creator of AlphaZero] hasn’t answered my question about whether machines can set up their own goals. He talks about subgoals, but that’s not the same. That’s a certain gap in his definition of intelligence. We set up goals and look for ways to achieve them. A machine can only do the second part.

So far, we see very little evidence that machines can actually operate outside of these terms, which is clearly a sign of human intelligence. Let’s say you accumulated knowledge in one game. Can it transfer this knowledge to another game, which might be similar but not the same? Humans can. With computers, in most cases you have to start from scratch.

Let’s talk about the ethics of AI. What do you think of the way the technology is being used for surveillance or weapons?

We know from history that progress cannot be stopped. So we have certain things we cannot prevent. If you [completely] restrict it in Europe, or America, it will just give an advantage to the Chinese. [But] I think we do need to exercise more public control over Facebook, Google, and other companies that generate so much data.

People say, oh, we need to make ethical AI. What nonsense. Humans still have the monopoly on evil. The problem is not AI. The problem is humans using new technologies to harm other humans.

AlphaZero “values bishop over knight. I think it added too much advantage to bishop in terms of numbers.”GARRY KASPAROV

AI is like a mirror, it amplifies both good and bad. We have to actually look and just understand how we can fix it, not say “Oh, we can create AI that will be better than us.” We are somehow stuck between two extremes. It’s not a magic wand or Terminator. It’s not a harbinger of utopia or dystopia. It’s a tool. Yes, it’s a unique tool because it can augment our minds, but it’s a tool. And unfortunately we have enough political problems, both inside and outside the free world, that could be made much worse by the wrong use of AI.

Returning to chess, what do you make of AlphaZero’s style of play?

I looked at its games, and I wrote about them in an article that mentioned chess as the “drosophila of reasoning.” Every computer player is now too strong for humans. But we actually could learn more about our games. I can see how the millions of games played by AlphaGo during practice can generate certain knowledge that’s useful.

It was a mistake to think that if we develop very powerful chess machines, the game would be dull, that there will be many draws, maneuvers, or a game will be 1,800, 1,900 moves and nobody can break through. AlphaZero is totally the opposite. For me it was complementary, because it played more like Kasparov than Karpov! It found that it could actually sacrifice material for aggressive action. It’s not creative, it just sees the pattern, the odds. But this actually makes chess more aggressive, more attractive.

Magnus Carlsen [the current World Chess Champion] has said that he studied AlphaZero games, and he discovered certain elements of the game, certain connections. He could have thought about a move, but never dared to actually consider it; now we all know it works.

When you lost to DeepBlue, some people thought chess would no longer be interesting. Why do you think people are still interested in Carlsen?

You answered the question. We are still interested in people. Cars move faster than humans, but so what? The element of human competition is still there, because we want to know that our team, our guy, he or she is the best in the world.

The fact is that you have computers that dominate the game. It creates a sense of uneasiness, but on the other hand, it has expanded interest in chess. It’s not like 30 years ago, when Kasparov plays Karpov, and nobody dared criticize us even if we made a blunder. Now you can look at the screen and the machine tells you what’s happening. So somehow machines brought many people into the game. They can follow, it’s not a language they don’t understand. AI is like an interface, an interpreter.

Impeached and empowered: Trump after the trial | NY Daily News | Feb 9th, 2020

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE NYDAILYNEWS.COM

“What do you expect? They’re all loyal Party men. They don’t worry about ‘facts’; they just do what they’re told.” — “Stalin’s Witnesses” by Julius Wachtel

It’s no coincidence that the word for a blindly loyal political minion originated in the Soviet Union. An “apparatchik” was a cog in the Communist Party apparatus, a drone carrying out orders without qualm or conscience. It’s meant as an insult, but that hasn’t prevented the word, and the type, from proliferating in the free world long after the Soviet machine broke down and rusted away.

The totalitarian communism I grew up under in the Soviet Union had a unique ability to crush the human spirit by making unquestioning loyalty the only relevant quality. As a Soviet joke went about a successful apparatchik’s rise, “He was very consistent and principled, and he demonstrated this by agreeing with whatever the official party line was at the moment.”

Since the state controlled everything, the apparatchik mindset permeated everything. Economic, cultural and intellectual stagnation were inevitable in such an environment, despite the formidable human and natural resources of the USSR and their ruthless exploitation by the Communists.

Occasionally a conflict or crisis had to be addressed publicly, and these were explained away with pretzel logic and tortured vocabulary. On paper, the Soviet Union believed in the rule of law. But often we were told that there was a higher law than mere printed words: the laws of necessity, of justice, of the good of the country. Who decided those? The right people, naturally, those blessed with the proper revolutionary conscience.

As Lenin wrote, “Marxist teaching is all-powerful because it is right!” Hard to argue with that logic, and woe unto you if you tried.

Forgive my reminiscing, but for the past few weeks, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a time machine. Echoes of Soviet-style statements about “higher laws” and “the interests of the state” were emanating from Washington throughout the impeachment trial. President Trump’s acquittal in the Senate was a predictable disgrace, but the rationales for it presented by the Republicans were just as damaging to the country as Trump himself.

Most of the GOP apparatchiks were content with their lockstep dance, repeating the official mantra that Trump did nothing wrong in extorting Ukraine to help his reelection. They parroted Trump’s “perfect call” mantra with the devotion of the functionaries surrounding North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, all terrified at the prospect of disappointing their master.

This group, the majority, simply ignored all the evidence, including Trump’s own recorded words. They didn’t care and they wanted everyone to know it, especially the Dear Leader. Their loyalty will be rewarded, they hope, or at least there won’t be any disloyalty to be punished.

A small clique of Republican senators — Lamar Alexander, Marco Rubio — chose a more subtle variation by admitting that what Trump had done was wrong, perhaps even impeachable, but that it wasn’t bad enough to remove him. Lisa Murkowski said, “Congress has failed” and joined Rubio in decrying the “partisan nature” of the impeachment, when of course it could have been bipartisan had they demonstrated an inch of spine.

Despite these performances of conflicted conscience, these paragons declined to do anything as paltry as voting for witnesses in a trial. Maine’s Susan Collins, perhaps most pathetically of all, voted for witnesses only after it was clear that her vote wouldn’t matter. One hopes that Collins and the rest of Trump’s GOP enablers will have plenty of time to ruminate on their positions after being voted out of office.

It wasn’t enough to have a predetermined result; there wouldn’t even be any new evidence presented at the trial. This did Stalin’s show trials one better. It was all going according to Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to paint the impeachment as a purely partisan affair initiated by rogue House leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. This would also provide cover for the rest of the GOP.

But standing in the way of this scheme like a Tiananmen Square protester in front of a tank was Mitt Romney, who voted to convict the president for abuse of power. Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president lest we forget, struggled emotionally through his eloquent statement explaining his vote, calling it “the most difficult decision I have ever faced.”

In one brief listing of indisputable facts, Romney demolished Trump’s defense: “The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The president’s purpose was personal and political. Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.”

Romney then explained why he felt obliged to vote to convict and by so doing, exposed the cowardice and hypocrisy of his Republican colleagues’ rationales for defending Trump: “Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.”

With nothing to gain, much to lose and Trump’s acquittal a foregone conclusion, Romney’s courage cast a harsh light. The partisan shield was breached. Romney didn’t have to paint a picture of Trump’s guilt or of Republican spinelessness, he had only to hold up a mirror.

(By the way, isn’t this an ideal time for Barack Obama to apologize to Romney at long last for deriding him for calling Russia the U.S.’s “number one geopolitical foe” in their 2012 presidential debate? Obama mocked Romney and ignored his warning and as a result of this negligence, Russian interference helped deliver Trump into the presidency.)

Just the night before the acquittal, Trump had used his State of the Union address to boast and threaten in the sort of spectacle usually reserved for circuses and dictatorships. Speaker Pelosi demonstrated her grasp of Trump-era political stagecraft by tearing up her copy of the speech on camera, becoming the talk of the night. It was a stunt, but I approve. You can’t entirely stop Trump from turning American politics into a circus, but you can fight him for the spotlight and point out that he’s a clown, not a ringmaster.

It took only two days for Trump to make his State of the Union speech look sane with a bizarre and rambling post-acquittal press conference on Thursday. Collins’ remark that Trump “had learned his lesson” after being impeached was tossed into the trash in record time. You can’t expect Trump to find the high road when he doesn’t even know Kansas City is in Missouri.

It’s telling that Trump is so unhinged after what could be considered an excellent week for the president. He was acquitted by the Senate, empowering him to commit further abuses unchecked. The Democrats turned the Iowa caucuses into a circus of their own — although I think the chaos should help the candidates most dangerous to Trump, the moderates who can point out the party needs a good manager just like the country does.

Trump got a small approval rating bump, if still shy of the 50% line he has never crossed. A good jobs report indicated that the American economy continues to grow.

Of course, all presidents claim credit for good economic news and blame other factors for any bad news. The economic recovery started under Obama, but it cannot be denied that it is continuing under Trump. The Democrats should talk more about how Trump is wasting taxpayer money — walls, tariffs, a ballooning debt — instead of competing with outlandish plans to spend even more.

No matter how deranged Trump sounds or how terrible something his administration does may be, something even worse comes along just hours later. As I’ve often warned, an autocratic leader has an unlimited capacity to surprise. Trump can manufacture a new scandal every hour until Election Day, and he will be happy to do so if it keeps him in the headlines.

[More Opinion] Mayor Mike and the myth of the magic manager: Voters should educate themselves on Bloomberg’s failures »

And just as the writers and directors of “The Apprentice” made Trump look like a decisive executive guru, Fox News edits and spins his rants into soundbites and positions that look relatively normal. Worse still, the rest of the mainstream media often performs this sanitizing treatment as well, still not having found a way to cover Trump honestly while satisfying their aspiration for fairness.

That way must be found, and quickly. The American political system has failed to adapt to the new environment of the internet and social media. From a few thousand outlets, there are now millions of new agents in the system, often unknown, anonymous and hostile. Trump’s supporters and campaign, learning well from their mentor Vladimir Putin, has aggressively weaponized these propaganda tools against their opponents and against the media.

It’s time to stop daydreaming about the GOP standing up to Trump. Romney stood, but he stood alone. The rest have become apparatchiks, eager to obey. Trump now feels unstoppable, and impunity is a very dangerous quality in an autocrat. Someone who feels invincible inevitably pushes too far, and he is never the only one harmed in the resulting catastrophe. The best way to survive nine more months of Trump is to work like hell to make sure it’s not four more years.

Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and of the NY-based Human Rights Foundation.

A Popular Front to Stop Trump | NYR Daily | January 28th, 2020

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT NYR DAILY

As much as opposing ideologues may hate each other, there is no one they despise more than those who try to make peace between them. The peacemakers may well be blessed in the hereafter, but in the earthly realm they are treated as badly as the poor and the meek. I found this out the hard way when I retired from chess in 2005 to help create a Russian coalition movement against the rising dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

By then, it was clear that Putin was returning at all possible speed to his Soviet and KGB roots. Elected as Boris Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor in 2000, Putin was reelected in a stage-managed landslide in 2004. Russia’s wealthiest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, had been jailed in 2003 for refusing to cease his dabbling in politics. The Russian media had been brought largely to heel by a Kremlin campaign of takeovers and threats. In April 2005, as if to remove any doubts, Putin made his infamous remark that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”

As world chess champion, I had tried to use my platform and the protection my fame provided me to speak out against communism and Soviet repression. But this time, it was going to be a full-time job. I was no politician, as critics were quick to point out, but I had unique status as someone who had long represented the USSR and Russia while maintaining a consistent position on liberty and democracy. That patriotic past made it difficult for the Kremlin to slander me as a Western stooge (though they tried) and I obviously wasn’t motivated by financial gain to swap the peak of the chess world to march in the streets of Moscow always outnumbered by riot police.

There was no time to lose. Putin was constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive presidential term in 2008, and I felt there was still a small chance to change the course of the country by having a real election and returning power to the people of Russia.

The numbers of those who would, or could, stand up to Putin’s tightening fist were small. It wasn’t easy to rally Russians to fight for liberties they had barely known and, to be honest, had seen few concrete benefits from. Skyrocketing oil prices allowed the Kremlin to claim credit for relative economic stability, but Russia was, and still is, a poor country for most of those outside the gilded rings of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The continued embrace of Putin by the world’s democratic leaders despite his crackdowns made it difficult to persuade people that he was turning Russia into an autocracy—and why Russians should care.

With no access to mass media and a dwindling number of dissenting voices left in politics, we took to the streets in a series of “Dissenters’ Marches.” Over the protests of many of my colleagues, I invited the participation of anyone who would march under our banner of free and fair elections. Along with my United Civil Front and prominent liberal voices like Boris Nemtsov, a former Yeltsin deputy prime minister, and Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister under Putin, this also meant groups like the National Bolsheviks, with their repulsive symbols and even more repulsive rhetoric. Most were youngsters who were more punk than proletarian, but who realized on some level that Putin’s closed society would have no room for them.

Alexey Sazonov/AFP via Getty Images

Russian opposition leaders Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov talking to each other before a pro-democracy protest (Nemtsov was subsequently assassinated, in 2015, within sight of the Kremlin), Moscow, 2010

It was hardly my dream to march alongside people whose beliefs I found abhorrent, but we all understood that none of our beliefs would matter if Putin weren’t challenged. As I often said in interviews at the time, when asked about my strange and dangerous new bedfellows, we would sit on opposite sides of parliament—but first we had to make sure we still had a parliament to sit in. To do that, we needed people who were willing to fight, and perhaps inspire others to do so.

To make this long, painful story shorter, Putin is still in power more than a decade later, Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015, and I have lived in New York since 2013. You could that say we were naïve, or too weak, or too late, or that there was never a chance against a KGB structure that had never really gone away. But I remain convinced that the idea of uniting against the greatest threat is paramount. Russian democracy may be gone, but the lessons of its rise and fall are more important now than ever. I just never imagined that they would apply so well, and so soon, to two lodestars of democracy, the United Kingdom and my new home of the United States of America.

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Rage and polarization are the lifeblood of any radical movement, and compromise means obsolescence and death. Voices of reason are shouted down, moderation is weakness, and doubts are insufficient belief in the cause. Criticism of the party leadership is base disloyalty, which has the effect of channeling authority upwards—especially dangerous when power resides in a small group, or, most dangerous of all, in one person.

In such an environment, ideology inevitably becomes less important than tribal identity, power for the sake of power. Policy goals and principles are cast aside as inconvenient burdens when the only thing that matters is winning at all costs. Political rivals are demonized, a necessary step to excuse the coming excesses against them. Debate ceases to be about two sides of an issue, becoming entirely separate streams of information, or misinformation, to the faithful.

History has many warnings about the catastrophic power of such methods in even the most enlightened environments. I prefer the less common example of Spain in the 1930s because it was a clash of two opposing and extreme forces that gradually pushed out every moderate element, resulting in a bloody civil war. In 1936, a new Popular Front coalition narrowly won national elections, but it was too little, too late. Francisco Franco led a coup with an alliance of nationalists that openly turned to fascism, including receiving the support of Hitler and Mussolini. The leftist Republican government turned to the USSR for help after France and Britain declared their neutrality, soon incorporating a vicious proxy war into the conflict and resulting in Stalin’s agents purging the Republican ranks of rival leftist groups like the Trotskyists.

The extremes left little room in the middle, even though few Spaniards wanted war at the start, let alone one that would associate half of them with Nazis and the other half with Stalinists. (Stalin could also claim credit for Hitler’s own rise: he demanded that the German Communist Party, the KPD, target not the fascists, but the dominant Social Democrats, who were denounced as “social fascists.” This effectively allied the Communists with the Nazis in bringing down the existing democratic order and paving the way for Hitler.)

Even in stable democracies, moderates find it difficult to compete against the overheated rhetoric and outlandish promises of radical demagogues. Reasonable leaders are expected to produce results, a bar that is constantly lowered and eventually discarded altogether by autocrats. They blame the opposition, the media, minorities, foreign enemies—anyone but themselves.

A modern media model based on clicks and trending topics feeds the electorate’s dopamine triggers of rage and joy. Centrists feel marginalized by the lack of attention their humble goals receive compared to the threats and fantasies of the radical wings. This leads many either to tune out, which cedes more space and influence to the radicals, or to pick a side in order to feel as though they have a voice.

There is no easy way out of these traps, and they don’t have to be fatal or final to be hugely damaging. Of course, the United States in the 2020s isn’t 1930s Spain or Russia in the early 2000s. A civil war or a full-blown dictatorship remain very unlikely outcomes. It’s the trend that is worrying—that these well-known roads to disaster are being cleared and paved in the world’s most powerful country.

Leading the way to political perdition is the American Republican Party. The party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is now slavishly loyal to a corrupt reality-TV host whose only demonstrable allegiances are to his own image and Vladimir Putin. GOP legislators of the past pushed back against Richard Nixon, against Gerald Ford, and even against Reagan and George W. Bush. That someone of the high crimes and low character of Donald Trump now commands complete Republican fealty says more about the state of the GOP, and perhaps the country, than about Trump—and it says nothing good.

Worse, the GOP sees Trump not as an embarrassment to endure but as a working model to perpetuate. What Trump believes matters not at all; it only matters that he won and holds power. Worst of all, Trumpism looks set to outlast Trump himself—with whichever equally unqualified family member tries to succeed him in the finest autocratic tradition. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election validated his personal bombastic political style. There is still time to relegate it as a terrible mistake, a tragic fluke of tiny electoral college margins, an unpopular opponent, foreign intervention, and media gullibility. But Trump’s reelection in 2020 would validate his political methods and have a long-lasting impact on America and the world.

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Demagogues and extremists draw the spotlight with hateful rhetoric or utopian promises—usually both. While we usually think of these movements as revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, democracies are not immune to these timeworn techniques. Attention translates into media coverage, into campaign donations, and into votes.

Despite the romantic image of coups as sudden insurgencies, usually military in nature, the reality is usually more prosaic and insidious. Putin was originally elected, albeit with considerable irregularities. Quite a few other elected leaders have followed Putin’s model of assaulting and degrading the democratic institutions they are supposed to protect in order to move from mere president to president-for-life. The architecture of a republic is surprisingly easy to pull down from within: you never know when your vote will be the last meaningful one you cast.

Trump has even begun talking publicly about staying in office beyond 2024, one of the many menacing boasts he makes at rallies that the mainstream media desperately dismisses as jokes. (As Masha Gessen wrote in these pages, “Rule #1: Believe the autocrat.”) And while anything beyond the 2024 election would be much to ask of Trump’s diminishing capacities—and the Constitution—there is no prohibition against one of Trump’s family members claiming the mantle, and no sign that the GOP will resist formally becoming the Trump Party.

We learned this the hard way in Russia, where our constitution has been altered, evaded, and ignored by Putin for years. As the 2018 US midterm election demonstrated, American institutions have deeper roots and have proved more robust than have Russia’s, but many of them are untested and rusty. Decades of partisan Congresses’ ceding their authority to presidents of the same party have turned the first branch into a third-class institution full of second-class minds. Congress was ill-prepared to deal with someone like Trump, a man with no concept of public service or the national interest, or anyone’s welfare beyond his own.

After three years of his increasingly disgraceful behavior, Trump’s critics still seem to believe there are lines he will not cross in order to protect himself and his power. This is a common mistake, and a natural one. A disregard for anything but oneself is a type of evil superpower in politics (and business). It allows such people to constantly surprise their rivals by doing what others find unthinkable. Every time I hear someone say, “But Trump would never do x,” I recall all the times we were told by tut-tutting Western pundits that surely Putin would never jail his opposition, would never return to the presidency, would never invade Ukraine, etc. He would and he did.

Laws are only as strong as the character of the people charged with enforcing them. They cannot be applied selectively, or you soon find yourself in the cynical world encapsulated in the words of the Peruvian military leader and politician Óscar Benavides, “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” A few days after Trump’s inauguration, I said in an interview that Americans were about to find out how much their government was based on traditions and the honor system. What happens when a president ignores those things? What happens when the executive declines to hold press briefings, and simply doesn’t fill leading positions in the vital government departments, appointing yes-men as acting heads who are often untested and unvetted?

Unallocated power accrues upwards, reducing accountability and transparency. It’s a slow-motion coup of attrition, largely invisible, with unpredictable and far-reaching effects.

Typical officials and bureaucrats expand their dominions by adding subordinates and creating new departments and agencies. Autocrats require total loyalty, so the circle of confidants inevitably shrinks both in size and in quality. In the resulting vacuum, no one can hear the whistleblower’s whistle, assuming there’s anyone left to blow it.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Trump saluting supporters at a “MAGA” rally, Montoursville, Pennsylvania, May 20, 2019

*

The rise of populist nationalism that has been gaining from the zero-sum global decline in democracy doesn’t belong to any political ideology or side. The populist left in Venezuela, Greece, and Spain sounds much like the populist right in Hungary, Turkey, and France. The far left and far right in the United States are starting to sound more and more like each other. Not in the content of their unrealistic promises, but in the vengeful tone of their rhetoric, their cynicism about democratic norms and institutions, their hostility toward the free press, and their attitudes toward expanding state power. What’s needed today is a popular front against populism.

The increasingly marginalized majority must, by voice and by vote, support candidates and media outlets that refuse to sink to sensationalism and hyper-partisanship. The Republicans and Fox News have followed in Trump’s footsteps, but the reaction cannot be to match them lie for lie, outrage for outrage. America’s two-party system can give the appearance of a zero-sum, “with us or against us” struggle, but it wasn’t so long ago that both “conservative Democrats” and “moderate Republicans” strode the halls of Congress. We need leaders who can argue policy and priorities without believing in an alternate reality or treating their opponents like enemies of the state.

The latest warning comes from America’s closest transatlantic ally, the United Kingdom. The recent election proved that in Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party had succeeded in fielding perhaps the only politician in the UK more reviled than the Tory leader, Boris Johnson—quite an achievement, made possible by Corbyn’s particular combination of personal deficiencies and outdated socialist platform. By pulling Labour’s agenda to the far left and refusing to step aside for a less unpopular candidate, Corbyn dashed millions of his traditional voters’ hopes and interests in electoral defeat and for years to come.

Corbyn also attempted to sidestep the issue of Brexit, when the country was, for perfectly logical reasons, obsessed with it. This is another lesson for the Democrats in 2020, who currently seem more interested in arguing over the minutiae of their health care plans than focusing on Donald Trump’s open assault on American democracy. There is a real chance the Democrats will nominate a candidate who is far left enough to keep some anti-Trump voters home and drive Trump voters to the polls. There won’t be any Green New Deals, Medicare for All, or loan forgiveness programs if Trump is reelected. They won’t even get a proper burial. Instead, Trump will likely get to replace two more aging, liberal Supreme Court judges and entrench his assault on American institutions for a generation. Such an arch-conservative Court would be a fortress against any modernizing initiatives required in our rapidly changing times.

Perhaps it’s because I was born in a totalitarian country, but I always thought the objective of elections was to win. There’s no moral victory against an autocrat; you just get written out of the next editions of the history books. Democrats shouldn’t look at Trump’s low approval rating and assume that any of their candidates will beat him, and that therefore the real competition is to out-promise each other in the primary contest. The voters whom the Democrats most need to turn out are the ones most likely to be frightened off by controversy and radical ideas—from either side.

A popular front against Trump would mean keeping him and his many abuses in the spotlight, as well as targeting his defenders in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to host an impeachment trial with witnesses. What might voters make of that? Repeat the facts about the administration’s crimes and failures, from the trade war tariffs that hurt American producers and consumers to his reckless, Corleone-style foreign policy. Ask Americans if they think the president should be above the law. Campaign on a return to stability and sanity, instead of trying to out-Trump Trump with wild promises and wild-eyed rhetoric.

Around 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election, enough to have defeated both Trump and Hillary Clinton. For all the talk of voter suppression and the potential for more foreign interference or outright cheating in 2020, even a moderate uptick in turnout in the right places would overwhelm any subtle fraud. Still, it is important to make clear that the watchers are watching, and that any campaign law violations or foreign interference will be dealt with severely. This would be part of a platform of unity and integrity that keeps these matters and Trump’s own well-documented immorality and criminality in the foreground.

There are many traditional issues worthy of thorough debate, to be sure. Economic inequality, threats to the environment, a ballooning deficit and the need to re-fund the entitlement budget as the huge Boomer generation leaves the workforce. The extravagances of debt-fueled commerce have gone unchecked, opening the door for socialists who want to tear down the system that created unprecedented prosperity, instead of working together to fix it. Vital matters, pressing matters—none of which will be addressed if Trump is reelected.

*

Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Putin examining a model of an aircraft carrier at an exposition in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Sevastopol, January 9, 2020

The stakes are high not just for the US. Putin isn’t going away, unfortunately, and his influence looms large in nearly every global crisis point, from Ukraine to North Korea to Venezuela to Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The Kremlin has taken lately to trolling Poland with lies about the origins of World War II and making noise about old Russian claims on Belorussia, both efforts to aggressively reinterpret the past. These misinformation offensives aren’t just for domestic consumption anymore, and Trump’s dubious support for NATO is very much on the minds of Baltic leaders. Putin badly needs Trump to stay in the White House, keeping the US out of his plans.

Iran threatens to be the crisis everyone dreaded the moment Trump’s election was confirmed. Since Trump cares nothing about national security or human life, we are left to hope that his self-interest doesn’t violently clash with national and global interests. But his attempted extortion of Ukraine and the Republicans’ lack of interest in punishing him for it are poor omens.

My past experience obliges me to give warnings, not predictions. As when I marched against Putin in 2005, raising the alarm about his turn toward despotism, I want to be proven wrong. I would like nothing better than to be called hysterical, a crank, a chessplayer who couldn’t see five moves ahead—if it meant that the American people had heeded the warning signs and acted in time to avoid a repeat of the painful recent history I witnessed.

Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate will send a message to the country and the world; the only question is what that message will be. No matter what Trump does, his GOP defenders will never abandon him if he looks politically invincible, and he will spawn more imitators, both at home and abroad. Back in 1974, Richard Nixon’s resignation in the face of impeachment proceedings so stunned Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership that they thought it might be an American ploy of some kind. I remember how it shocked my family in Baku in a very different way—because we saw it as evidence that in a democracy even the top man was not above the law. How could we not imagine what it would be like to live in such a blessed place ourselves?

But for Trump to stay in office, especially if he wins reelection in 2020, will inspire authoritarians and dishearten their subjects. It will set a negative example for both US political parties that there are no consequences for cheating and lying. The downward spiral will accelerate. The only remedy is to mobilize public opinion and for the American people to hold not only Trump accountable, but his defenders as well. And that will have to happen the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box in November.

January 28, 2020, 7:00 am

 

Kasparov: AI won’t cause the downfall of mankind | FOXBusiness | Jan 11th, 2020

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Garry Kasparov believes humans should cooperate, not fear, artificial intelligence.

The man widely considered to be one of the greatest chess players of all time said humans shouldn’t fear artificial intelligence.

Garry Kasparov told FOX Business’ Gerry Baker on “WSJ at Large,” those who are warning AI will replace us are just wrong.

“I’m really concerned about the doomsayers, all these doomsayers that are trying to terrorize our minds,” he said. “And maybe we should stop watching too many Hollywood movies because the future is for our making.”

“I’m arguing that we have to work with machines, and there’s the endless opportunities that will actually bring more benefits than problems, as it’s happened many times before.”

– Garry Kasparov, chess grandmaster

Kasparov should know about the power of AI. His defeat in 1997 by the IBM computer, Deep Blue, is considered the major turning point in the argument over whether machines could ever outthink humans.

“My experience [is] fighting machines,” he said. “But now, I’m arguing that we have to work with machines, and there’s the endless opportunities that will actually bring more benefits than problems, as it’s happened many times before.”

Kasparov is author of the book, “Deep Thinking:  Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins,” based on what he learned from his battle with Deep Blue.  And he believes that while AI will be disruptive to the workforce, that won’t spell gloom and doom for employees.

Grandmaster chess player Garry Kasparov taps the clock after a move in a match against grandmaster Fabiano Caruana on Aug. 18, 2017. (BILL GREENBLATT/AFP via Getty Images)

“The machines always helped us,” he points out.  “Yes, they always create problems. Obviously many industries are just, you know, facing their end, but jobs do not disappear. They evolve.”

But to what level of purely human achievement can computers actually reach?  Kasparov isn’t sure, but even so, he’s betting on mankind to come out on top.

The Russian essayist and activist Garry Kasparov at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. Rome, May 20, 2016 (Photo by Mondadori via Getty Images)

“Maybe we should stop watching too many Hollywood movies because the future is for our making.”

– Garry Kasparov, chess grandmaster

“Machines could do many, many, many things,” he admits.  “We don’t know their limits, but I think it’s what we should, you know, consider that our imagination, our dreams will not be limited.”