Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 41

FUTUREwork 2019 Insights: Garry Kasparov about Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

Former chess world champion, author and AI expert Garry Kasparov shares his story and talks about human-machine collaboration at FUTUREwork Convention & Festival 2019 by BDA and Microsoft Deutschland.

– Further information on www.futurework.online

“The dam is breaking: Trump’s true character is revealed, more fully than ever” | Op-ed at NYDaily | Sept 27th, 2019

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

By GARRY KASPAROV

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
SEP 27, 2019 | 11:09 AM

In the classic Mafia movie “Goodfellas,” Ray Liotta’s character muses about how he always wanted to grow up to be in the mob. “To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States.” What a failure of imagination. He didn’t even consider you could be both!

Like any crook returning to the scene of the crime, President Trump got nabbed asking for foreign help to attack an election rival, and this time he was caught orange-handed. The first time he did it, pleading for Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails in July 2016, Trump was only a candidate. This time, when he pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son in exchange for U.S. aid money, it was as the president of the United States.

Trump and his proxies have barely attempted to deny the obvious this time, moving directly to the “so what?” phase. Instead of “no collusion!” it’s now “no quid pro quo!” But as anyone who actually read the Mueller report knows, there was collusion. And no one who read the released log of Trump’s call with Zelensky could miss the quid or the quo. Trump believes that if he doesn’t think something is wrong, then it’s not wrong, the law be damned.

Trying to barter American taxpayer money and U.S. national security interests for campaign dirt — which seems to be fictitious — was an abuse of power so blatant and so grave that Nancy Pelosi was finally moved to announce a formal impeachment inquiry.

Until now, the over-cautious speaker of the House had placed her 2020 political calculations over her constitutional duty to apply the rule of law to Trump’s growing list of crimes and misdemeanors.

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As it always does, such an approach only encouraged further abuses. As I once wrote about Vladimir Putin, one of the many despots Trump so admires, such people transgress norms and laws easily, looking around each time to see what the reaction will be. If the response is weak, they take another step. Eventually, their sense of impunity overwhelms their sense of danger and they take a step too far.

When that happens, if they haven’t yet managed to destroy or neutralize the institutions designed to hold them accountable, you get the sort of crisis that is now unfolding.

Of course, it’s not fair to put all the blame on Pelosi and the other Democrats who have stood up to Trump mostly on Twitter. His true enablers have been the elected Republican officials who have tied themselves to the mast of Trump’s rotting ship and well deserve to go down with it. They chose power and party over country, even though it meant handing over control of the GOP to a cartoonish thug.

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They have abandoned their oversight responsibilities as well as any pretense of traditional conservatism — things like deficits, free trade, national defense and not using the Constitution as toilet paper. Few Republicans even bother to pretend to hold their noses at Trump’s foulness, his reckless policies, and his eagerness to embrace some of the world’s worst tyrants.

It’s a shame that poor Ukraine has found itself once again squeezed between much larger powers. Zelensky, elected president in April, is a former comedian, but a background in tragedy would be more useful. His country has been at war with Russia since Putin invaded in early 2014, annexing the Crimean Peninsula and sending forces into Eastern Ukraine, where nearly 13,000 Ukrainians have been killed. Western support has been half-hearted, its sanctions and condemnations of Putin’s aggression followed by expanding economic deals that enrich him and his cronies.

Ukraine still needs support, including U.S. aid, so Zelensky was in an awkward position on the phone call with Trump. (In these pages in April 2016, I called Trump “a bully who targets the most vulnerable.”) Zelensky might be an inexperienced politician, but I’m sure he’s seen his share of Mafia movies, and perhaps even acted in a few, so Trump’s crude extortion attempt would hardly have been misunderstood. He responded the way so many other world leaders have learned to deal with Trump, by flattering him and telling him what he wants to hear.

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It was hardly dialogue at the level of Mario Puzo’s Don Corleone. Trump didn’t stop at asking Zelensky for a favor — helping smear Biden in exchange for releasing the $250 million in aid to Ukraine that had already been mandated by Congress. Trump also revealed his ignorance of Ukraine with his comments about a dismissed prosecutor and his persistent delusions about shifting blame away from Russia for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee server in 2016. He even made a cryptic threat against the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. All this in five pages of a call summary that Trump and his team thought would exonerate him!

This follows another familiar autocratic pattern: When you can no longer credibly deny the facts, deflect to details, push alternative theories and slander the witnesses and accusers. For the full neo-Soviet disinformation campaign, toss in some whataboutism and flood the state news channels — aka Fox News — with your surrogates and sycophants. The goal is to get you to forget the facts, and that what Trump and Rudy Giuliani have already openly admitted to doing is enough to warrant impeachment.

More damning evidence of Trump’s extortion scheme came to light when the whistleblower complaint was released. The White House tried to cover up Trump’s incriminating exchanges with Zelensky by moving the call transcript to a classified electronic records system, not the sort of thing you do if you don’t think you have anything to hide.

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The cover-up reveals that Trump has largely succeeded in surrounding himself with people loyal only to him, not the country. He also wants them all to be complicit, to know they will go down if he does. Unashamed as always, Trump attacked the whistleblower and made more thuggish threats. It’s a remarkable coincidence that everyone who points out Trump’s crimes is a traitor.

Watergate was a petty crime that led to graver abuses by the Nixon White House trying to cover it up. It was a small, domestic affair compared to the global Mafia syndicate we’re seeing in action today. Trump’s crime is not small at all and the cover-up is indicative of how bad things would continue to get if he’s left unchecked by legal action.

That Trump’s corruption always comes back to Russia is no coincidence. He’s been getting talking points from the Kremlin since he was a candidate in 2016, and there is little doubt that whomever he and his emissary Giuliani were dealing with in Ukraine are on Putin’s team, just as Trump’s jailed campaign chief Paul Manafort was. Recall that the first smoking gun of Russian influence on Trump was editing the 2016 GOP platform to remove a line about the need to provide lethal military assistance to Ukraine.

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Trump was already in the gutter, but Giuliani’s deranged cheerleading for Trump, and his role as a fixer on his behalf, complete a steep fall from 9/11 grace. We should now discover who was paying Giuliani’s fees for his services in Ukraine, at least once the White House makes up its collective mind on whether he was coordinating with Mike Pompeo and the State Department or not. This deniability and blurring of public/private lines are also typical of the corrupt autocracies the Trump administration often emulates. The buck stops nowhere.

Waiting for the 2020 presidential election to solve this crisis presupposes that the election will be an honest one, something that was hard to imagine even before Trump was again caught seeking foreign interference on his behalf.

It’s pointless trying to imagine the depths Trump will go to in order to win reelection because such people have a limitless ability to shock. Trump has no sense of social norms or public service or duty to anything or anyone but himself. He is terrified of losing power and his bluster about welcoming an impeachment fight is the rage of a bully whose victim finally punched him in the nose.

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This is one of the most serious threats American democracy has ever faced because it strikes at its core: that no one is above the law. I strongly disagree with pundits claiming that impeaching Trump is a distraction, or that it will backfire. You either fight like hell for the rule of law or you abandon it to its enemies. If the country is so far adrift from its democratic moorings that it’s no longer possible to condemn flagrant corruption during an election campaign, just award Trump his second term now and pray that it’s his last.

I’m not politically naïve. I’ve seen with my own eyes what happens when you start making concessions on principle with a president who has no principles. Every single member of Congress should be on the record for all to see. It’s time to pick a side, and those who choose Donald Trump over the law of the land will not be forgotten, or remembered kindly.

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

 

“Democratic leaders need to stop sending all-is-forgiven messages to Putin” | Washington Post | September 17th, 2019

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

By Garry Kasparov 




September 17, 2019 at 5:51 p.m. EDT

Garry Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and the author of “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.”

When Russian local elections didn’t go President Vladimir Putin’s way on Sept. 8, he didn’t take it well. Despite the usual techniques of banning and jailing opposition candidates, beating peaceful protesters and putting the full weight of state-controlled media behind favored candidates, Putin’s United Russia party lost seats across the country, especially in Moscow.

Four days later, Putin launched the largest security operation of his 20-year reign. Raids took place in 43 cities across Russia, with police breaking into the offices and homes of opposition groups and activists, confiscating documents, computers and even coffee machines.

The supposed show of strength was evidence that Putin’s grip on Russia isn’t as tight as he pretends. He has switched from propaganda to a campaign of violence, first against the protesters and then with raids intended to produce terror, not arrests. Bystanders can be arrested and sentenced to years in prison for assaulting a member of the state security forces — a statute used against me in my own arrest seven years ago.

Putin’s popularity was already sinking as Russians struggle with economic stagnation — stagnation that has been exacerbated by Western sanctions prompted by his war against Ukraine. The crackdown is almost certain to further damage his support.

Whenever Putin faces domestic strife, he looks abroad. Usually this means stirring up trouble so he can portray himself as the bold defender of the motherland, although more Russians now openly question his deadly and costly adventures in Syria and Ukraine. In the current dangerous standoff between Saudi Arabia and his client Iran, Putin will be happy to fan the flames of conflict, knowing it will spike the price of oil — a boon for the oil-dependent Russian economy and for his hold on power.

Yet even as Putin’s position grows more precarious, he has been thrown a lifeline by two supposed leaders of the free world, President Trump and French President  Emmanuel Macron. Trump’s inexplicable sycophancy toward Putin is well-documented. France has increased trade with Russia despite sanctions, and Macron recently echoed Trump in expressing support for Russia’s return to the group of leading industrialized economies. The idea is baffling, given that Russia was ejected from the Group of Eight in 2014 for invading and annexing Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that remains under Russian domination.

When the West sends these all-is-forgiven messages to Russia, Putin immediately exploits them to show Russian elites that he’s still the big man, that only he can get sanctions lifted — and that he’s not going anywhere.

Instead of deterring Putin from further acts of aggression, whether it’s election interference or invading a neighbor, such appeasement tells him only that there’s no reason to change his ways. What is needed is a united front of democratic nations declaring that Russia will never come in from the cold until it abandons its repression at home and its malign adventures abroad.

I have helped organize an open letter calling for such a response, with signatories prominent in politics, diplomacy, law, the arts and human rights, drawn from around the world and across the political spectrum. The letter urges democratic leaders to deny Putin the international legitimacy he craves and to cut off the economic ties that he uses to spread corruption and to fund his domestic repression, hybrid wars and global assassination campaigns.

It cannot happen soon enough. The last thing the United States needs heading into a presidential election year is an emboldened Putin, this time with his favorite candidate wielding the powers of the presidency. It was astonishing that in the Democratic presidential debate last week, the word “Russia” wasn’t mentioned. Democrats appear to be joining Trump and the Republicans in ignoring what U.S. intelligence agencies regard as among this nation’s gravest national security threats.

On Monday, news broke that Russia had breached FBI communications systems in 2010, while President Barack Obama was still touting his absurd “reset” with Putin. Trump has managed to make things even worse. Why bother bugging the president’s phones if he’s going to ring you up and tell all on his own? Imagine how much a former KGB man such as Putin could get out of him in two hours of unsupervised conversation like they had in Helsinki last year.

I was honored to speak last Thursday at the Black Ribbon Day Conference in Toronto, devoted to the 80th anniversary of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin that paved the way for World War II. The gathering had two main themes: reminding the world that Stalin was Hitler’s murderous partner for nearly two years and sounding an alarm about Putin’s project to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation.

Lithuanian political scientist Marius Laurinavicius spoke powerfully at the event. He noted that in democracies, it’s inexcusable for citizens to blame elected officials for the paths their nations take. Responsibility lies elsewhere: “It’s you,” he said, “it’s all of us.” Unlike the people of Russia, citizens of the free world can hold their politicians accountable, and it is long past time to do so.

“AI never forgets, so we must teach it to forgive” | Avast Blog post | September 22nd, 2019

READ ORIGINAL POST AT AVAST.COM

Artificial intelligence is listening, and that is unstoppable – but we must all safeguard the privacy of children

“There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology … But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.” – Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”

According to a recent Microsoft report, users of digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, continue to weigh convenience over potential privacy concerns. Eighty percent report being satisfied with the utility these devices provide; only half that percentage (41%) are concerned about the safety of the data they acquire. As I have written previously, this is a tradeoff every one of us must weigh in the digital age, and there aren’t any right or wrong answers. But there are informed and uninformed decisions, and I suspect these survey respondents did not properly consider how the data they feed into their virtual assistants could be used. Once your data is introduced to algorithms, the chain of ownership is broken and you lose control – for children that is an unfair burden, as well as a potential security risk.

Even if you trust the companies that are collecting your data and the algorithms that analyze and apply it, there is a concern of hackers gaining access to it. We may understand what a criminal hacking group wants with our credit card numbers and identity information, but no one can be sure what harm  will result from exploitation of the AI analysis of our behavior, our biometric data, and other sensitive data. State actors could use these details to steal secrets, interfere in elections, or manipulate or blackmail officials. Repressive states are already using advanced hacking tools to target dissidents and other groups.

Your personal data feeding the AI machines

There remain immediate reasons to be wary of digital assistants. The business model in place depends on continued improvements in their accuracy and intelligence. The data that comes in is assimilated into the machine’s learning algorithm, helping the AI to avoid past mistakes and make better predictions. In a recurring loop, the consumer gleans the benefits of the technology, while continuously providing material for its improvement. Around the time of the Microsoft report cited above, it was revealed that Amazon has a dedicated team of employees that listen to voice recordings made by Alexa, in order to train the software to perform better. Amazon’s response was to emphasize that it only records “an extremely small sample” of recordings to improve consumer experience. Disturbingly, however, even users who opt out of having their recordings fed back into the system could still be subject to this manual review process. This month Facebook also admitted paying contractors to listen to and transcribe Messenger conversations. Then Apple confessed that human employees were listening to Siri recordings, reportedly including users having sex. In other words, the information you give to a digital assistant isn’t just going into the black box of an AI. It could very well be replayed by other human beings, not to mention in a way that is traceable back to you.

We tend to be more concerned about humans gaining access to our data, but what about the algorithms themselves? The issue is not limited to this one particular class of products like digital assistants – it ties into far broader ethical considerations about AI. The bits of information we cede to intelligent machines may enter as discrete bundles, but they then cease to be identifiable, subsumed by the network. It is no longer merely a matter of having the rights and regulations in place that give consumers ownership over their data. Today, our information is perpetually being incorporated into complex algorithms, often ones that are no longer transparent even to the engineers who built them.

Our individual data points help to strengthen and expand these systems, but in the process we lose our ownership over them. In the case of AI, there is no way to change one’s mind and reclaim possession of one’s digital property. It should be emphasized that these considerations are not purely philosophical. Take the European Union’s passage of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) last year: Very tangible problems of implementation immediately arise. How do regulators enforce the “right to be forgotten” if the data in question has been incorporated into an AI’s learning processes?

Children’s missteps should remain theirs

We might also consider the concrete implications for different groups, such as the generation growing up in the midst of this technology. As described in a must-read Wired article, they will face difficulties no previous generation has ever encountered. For one, they will have extensive digital records documenting their lives starting from childhood, trailing behind them for every job interview and loan application, not to mention on prospective dates.

Digital assistants and other AIs do not explain to children or teenagers long-lasting data impacts that a human might patiently make clear. They capture the information with an indifference to those kinds of considerations. The information they collect can then be plugged into algorithms that dictate important social outcomes. A student who got caught cheating in a video recording, for instance, might continue to be remembered and penalized for this misstep well into adulthood, prompting a vicious cycle of underachievement and further infractions. Presumably, we would like to build societies that allow children the space to make mistakes and learn from them. And yet, by putting vast power in the hands of AI, we set the stage for the opposite: a world in which past errors become indelible marks on a person’s record and limit the opportunities for self-improvement.

As we think about these issues, we must balance, as always, the incredible capabilities of these technologies with their corresponding downsides. We should continue to improve AI systems to better serve our goals. As these machines become smarter and more efficient, they will become ever more valuable partners in helping us build vibrant and prosperous societies.

The problems discussed above are serious, and they require urgent attention. We cannot find the right solutions if we fail to keep our fundamental values front and center in the discussion. Regulation must aim to preserve a commitment to individual privacy, in a manner updated for the digital age. (A battle that has been going on at least since the invention of the telephone, as I’ll investigate more in my next blog post.) The tremendous power of AI is finding connections in data that are invisible to the human mind, so there will inevitably be unintended consequences.

Along with considering technological advances, solutions must now be more global, to match the scale of the technology they address. And they must strive to preserve these rights without blocking a path forward for continued tech progress. As a parent with young kids, I am far more excited than afraid for my kids to be growing up at this revolutionary time. But to ensure that they reap the benefits of the powerful digital tools at their fingertips, we must recognize their long-term consequences, especially for those too young to have a voice.

 

Garry Kasparov Toronto September 12, 2019

Keynote speech by Garry Kasparov for the 80th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at The Black Ribbon Day conference at The University of Toronto.

“La Liga: Turning users into involuntary spies” | Avast Blog | Aug 22, 2019

PLEASE READ ORIGINAL POST AT AVAST.COM

There is little that security software can do when the users themselves give apps broad permissions

I’ve often written here about how companies exploit our tendency to accept lax security defaults. People don’t have time to read thousands of pages of terms of service or bother to ask why a mobile game needs to know their ID and location. (It’s usually to sell your info to advertisers.) And once you’ve given permission on installation there is little to be done to monitor their activities – assuming they even play by the rules.

An example that hit the news again recently was the official app of the Spanish football league, La Liga. Installed more than 10 million times, it used the phone’s microphone and location info to listen to background audio to detect if pubs and restaurants were illegally broadcasting La Liga games. The app essentially turned every user into a spy for the company. This is abuse of course, and this surveillance “feature” was not disclosed to users. It takes little imagination to realize how dangerous this could be.

I was a little surprised to hear from Avast’s security experts that there is little that security software can do in this case, since the users themselves actually gave the app the permission to record audio. When the app is installed, it asks if it can use your phone’s location and microphone. Once you say yes to these permissions – required to install the app, and who ever says no to these requirements? – there is little any third-party software can do. You’ve handed over the keys, and users don’t want false positives warning them about things they’ve already approved. Similarly, phone manufacturers don’t want to create security obstacles that might annoy users, and they know they probably won’t suffer any consequences from the next privacy fiasco because they happen so often that we’ve become numb.

The privacy and security outrages come so fast on the heels of each other that regulatory agencies can’t keep up even when they are empowered to do so. Consumers have even less ability to keep track, or to discern which scandals matter from those that spread virally but aren’t real threats.

For example, the FaceApp panic spread almost as fast as the app itself when it was discovered that the virally popular (if not new) photo-altering app originates in Russia and was collecting user data and images. I’m the last person to wave off concerns about threats from Russia, but this appears to have been overblown, according to Avast’s head of mobile threat intelligence, Nikolaos Chrysaidos. To me, it shows how little people pay attention to these practices in general. FaceApp does what millions of other apps do: collect your information in exchange for advertising to you and selling your data to others. Those buyers could be political research firms, aggregators who create user profiles, or yes, even “the Russians.”

This is an unacceptable status quo. La Liga was fined for the violation thanks to existing privacy protection regulations in Europe (which are weak, but still stronger than anywhere else). For corporate giants, such penalties are the price of doing business and are unlikely to deter future abuses when entire business models are based on pushing the limits of data collection, AI analysis, and marketing. Europe’s GDPR isn’t perfect, but more regulatory measures will need to be tried and tested for there to be any progress. Perhaps the fines should be scaled relative to the offending company’s revenues, like Finnish speeding tickets, so they won’t be ignored. More nations need agencies such as Spain’s national data protection agency (AEPD), and consumers should listen to them.

Meanwhile, you might be bugged to set up strong privacy settings on your phone and use security software, but if you don’t, you might be bugged by an app!

 

Microsoft Summit 2019: Garry Kasparov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83xiO...

The Bright Future of Human + Machine by Garry Kasparov, 13th World Chess Champion, speech at Microsoft Summit 2019, Athens, Greece.

 

“What Mueller will tell us, and what he won’t” | NY Daily News | April 1st, 2019

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL AT THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

“Trump and Trumpism remain a clear and present danger to America”

The Mueller investigation is over, but the arguments about what it says, and what it means, are just beginning. Everyone is racing to spin Mueller’s conclusions as presented by President Trump’s recently appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, who took 48 hours to write a four-page letter announcing the conclusions of a report alleged to be over 300 pages long.

Considering the Trump administration’s typical communication practices, we’re lucky to get four whole pages and not just a triumphant presidential tweet. Trump’s boasting arrived on schedule a day later, claiming complete exoneration from two years of accusations of collusion with Russia.

Until the full report comes out, and it must, all we know for sure is that Special Counsel Mueller didn’t believe he had enough evidence to charge Trump himself with the principal wrongdoing he was authorized to determine, that of actively conspiring with the government of Russia in its campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. It was always going to be difficult to reach the high bar required to prove beyond doubt that Trump himself was criminally culpable, even as many of his closest advisers were convicted.

Not being indicted for the unethical and illicit acts everyone already knows you and your subordinates committed is a precarious platform from which to declare victory, but of course that’s what Trump and his supporters are doing.

It’s a strange claim coming from someone whose campaign manager, personal attorney and national security adviser were all indicted by the Russia probe. They, like Trump himself, spent years lying about their contacts with Russian operatives. Had all those charges come out at once last week, along with those against two dozen Russians and other Trump team members, it’s hard to imagine anyone calling it any kind of victory for the president. It would be considered, and still should be, the greatest scandal in the history of the US government.

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Even more surprising, Mueller also declined to charge Trump with obstructing the investigation, something he has done publicly nearly every day, from threatening witnesses to blatantly lying about what and when he and his team knew about meetings with Russians.

Barr provided a logical fallacy when he said there couldn’t be an obstruction charge without proof of an underlying crime to obstruct, and, since there was no collusion charge, there could be no charge for obstructing the investigation of collusion. But what if the goal of the obstruction was to prevent discovery of the crime that was therefore not discovered? He’s essentially saying that obstruction of justice cannot exist if it’s successful.

This circular absurdity reminded me of Polonius pondering the cause and effect of Hamlet’s madness:

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That we find out the cause of this effect, Or rather say, the cause of this defect, For this effect defective comes by cause: Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.

Legal experts seem mystified as to why Mueller stopped short of charging Trump with obstruction, calling it a “cop-out.” I suggest that it’s because making a criminal charge against a sitting president is still a grave act with historic and historical implications. To a man like Mueller — thoughtful, patriotic, a Marine, FBI director, and life-long public servant — it may seem like he is showing the respect for the American presidency that Trump himself has never shown.

Many hoped that those same qualities would lead Mueller in the other direction, to contempt and disgust at someone like Trump befouling the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And while I admit it would have been satisfying to see Trump held personally accountable for his eager cooperation with Putin’s attack on the U.S. electoral system, and all the lies that came after, I also respect Mueller’s reticence.

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I feel this way because, as bad as Trump is, Trumpism is worse. Prosecuting Trump would be just, but it would also be divisive and a distraction from the bigger issues facing the country, and the world, heading into the 2020 election cycle.

You’re right to wonder how anything could be bigger than a U.S. president and his team collaborating with Putin’s hostile dictatorship. Since I’ve spent over a decade warning about Putin’s threat, I’m the last person to minimize what it means to have the American president literally and figuratively in the debt of a KGB dictator dedicated to weakening the U.S. and its allies in the free world.

That part isn’t up for debate, by the way. Russians had leverage over Trump. Trump asked for and received help in the campaign from Russians. Trump has remained steadfastly loyal to Vladimir Putin. Those are facts. The Mueller report, just with what has already been released, puts to rest years of Trump whining about “witch hunts” and “hoaxes” by documenting Russia’s multi-faceted influence campaign. Nearly every part of his campaign had extensive contacts with Russians, from his family to his campaign director to big donors like the NRA.

[More Opinion] Show and tell: New York must expose Trump’s taxes »

Note I say “Russians,” and not “Russia,” a key distinction. The Barr letter refers to failing to find collusion with the “Russian government,” a major clue in explaining why there was no indictment. Putin’s mafia structure is designed to give “Russia” deniability. It’s like going to war using mercenaries instead of conscripts in uniforms, another favorite Putin tactic. Putin uses his billionaire oligarchs as emissaries to corrupt, cultivate, and compromise foreign business people and politicians. But they aren’t officially state actors with government titles, and so aren’t deemed “state actors,” although that is exactly what they are.

So Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort sharing polling data with a Ukrainian citizen loyal to the Kremlin, or with a billionaire buddy of Putin, isn’t “conspiring with the Russia government” only in the most technical, least accurate sense. It’s likely Mueller was not allowed to construe someone like Putin crony Oleg Deripaska as serving “Russia” when he had Manafort on his payroll.

This exploitation of gray areas is another dangerous aspect of Trumpism, another technique first honed by Putin and other modern autocracies. They find the undefined spaces between public and private, legal and illegal, media and propaganda, and they exploit every gap. The private-state nature of corrupt criminal dictatorships like Putin’s Russia confounds law enforcement the way hybrid war and terrorism confound traditional military response. The U.S. badly needs greater systemic transparency for banking and campaign finance reform, and more ways to fight back against the spread of corruption from within and from abroad.

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Mueller was obliged to play by the rules, as befits an independent justice system, but he was like a boxer going up against an opponent who is allowed to kick, scratch and bite. Free world legal systems (and news organizations) are simply not equipped to deal with a wealthy nation-state like Russia being run for private gain by people acting as private citizens. This is also how most Middle East autocracies are run — like Saudi Arabia, another Trump favorite — and China has few borders between its business might and its political leadership. It’s a role Trump was born for, having no sense of national interest or concept of serving anything but himself. This is why he’s Putin’s dream counterpart, regardless of how badly he may be compromised.

It’s unlikely that the debate will end even when the entire Mueller report is released, regardless of what it says. This is part of the spreading poison of Trumpism, the immediate tribalistic divide on every issue. When news and politics move at Twitter speed, with reaction meeting overreaction meeting backlash in just hours, that’s a victory for the forces of ignorance and emotion over information and reason. That’s Trumpism’s home turf.

I’m concerned that the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons and look for their own Trump, and their own brand of Trumpism by embracing radical rhetoric and candidates at the expense of serious policy and rebuilding the integrity of the political system. Trump and the Republicans who enable him remain the clear and present danger, but if the Democrats become what they hate, they may end up with four more years of hating Trump. This is an unacceptable risk, because Putin is now going to be even bolder in his attacks.

[More Opinion] To BQE or not to BQE: In praise of de Blasio’s Hamlet act on how to rebuild a car and truck artery »

Congress should not be cowed by Trump’s celebration without exoneration. The House must keep looking into Trump’s conflicts of interest and dubious loyalties while also hardening the U.S.’s defenses, knowing that the Republican-controlled Senate will do nothing to help. The GOP has become not just the party of whatever Trump says, but whatever Trump says today. Tomorrow there will be a whole new list of lies they will accept as the truth.

In this they side with Hamlet when he said, “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is how the poison of fake news and moral relativism spreads. There is right, there is wrong. There is good, there is evil. We would do well to remember that before following Hamlet to the end, where everyone dies by poison.

Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.”

Garry Kasparov Says AI Can Make Us ‘More Human’ | PCMag Interview | March 20th, 2019

READ ORIGINAL AT PCMAG.COM

‘It’s not opening the gates of hell, but it’s not a paradise,’ Garry Kasparov says about AI.
“Artificial intelligence learns from us, so we should really fear bad actors, not killer robots.”

 

Garry Kasparov was one of the first victims of the AI automation revolution. His loss to IBM’s Deep Blue made him the first human chess champion to lose a match to a computer. But Kasparov is not jaded; his book, Deep Thinking, explores how AI can actually help us become more human.

The real challenge, Kasparov told me at SXSW in Austin this month, is keeping these tools from the humans who want to use them to do harm. And in that regard, we may already be too late.

Dan Costa: After a career playing chess and battling Deep Blue, you’ve since then become a chess AI expert of sorts. How do you want people to understand artificial intelligence?

Garry Kasparov: I have to confess that I know the limits of my ignorance. That’s why I am happy to talk about things where I’m confident about my own expertise, and I think I have certain knowledge of human-machine relations, and I could speak with some authority about the future outcomes.

Also, I believe that we’re still at a very early age of AI, and we should debate even some terms. It’s about semantics, it’s about philosophy, and I always say that people think we are at Windows 10 era, while we’re still all at MS-DOS.

At this moment, it’s very important to actually understand, “What is AI? When we say AI, what do we mean?” Because if you ask 10 experts about AI, I bet you will get 11 or 12 answers. There’s still quite a disagreement.

There’s still details, but I think in general, we recognize okay, there’s a group of people who we’ll call optimists, facing the big crowd of doomsayers. Somehow, [the] public is more willing to accept doomsayer scenarios, I think it’s our instinct to fear the future, which is also interesting because when you go back to [the] 50s and 60s, the sci-fi was very optimistic. It was all about us, just working with machines.

Now, when you look at 70s, 80s, 90s, it’s shifted to dystopian vision. It’s about terminators. It’s about the Matrix, and now [the] sci-fi genre is almost dead because it’s more about fantasy, it’s about magic. People are really afraid talking about the future because we’re not sure what is going to happen there. I think that we should simply recognize that AI is not a magic wand, but it is not a terminator. It’s not a harbinger of utopia or dystopia. It’s a tool. It’s something we should find a way to deal with.

It’s not opening [the] gates of hell, but it’s not a paradise. It’s not a solution for everything. It’s not a salvation. Let’s look at the Earth’s issues and my biggest concern today is not about killer robots or some sort of the virtual reality that could ruin our sense of reality, but it’s about bad actors. It’s about terrorists. It’s about rock space using this technology to harm us. I always say that people…have [a] monopoly [on] evil. That’s where we should, I think concentrate, but it also should recognize AI could do so many great things for us because what people will say, “Oh, AI creates new challenges. AI could take away many jobs.” Exactly. That’s what’s happened with jobs in agriculture, jobs in manufacturing. Disruptive technology always destroys industries but at the same time, creates new jobs.

I say that technology is the main reason why so many people are still alive to complain about technology because we just don’t recognize the average lifespan grew, I think 45, 47 [in the] early 20th century to now 75, thanks to technology. We want benefits, we want convenience, and we don’t look at the price. People buy Alexa, or download a facial-recognition app, and then complain about the privacy. It’s time for us to understand what we expect from these technologies, so how we want to deal with them? How they can improve our lives and at the same time recognize that we should not debate about spilled milk. It’s going to happen.

We should not ask whether we want it or not, it’s happening. Any attempt to protract the agony, and to slow down the process, I think is just counterproductive because jobs that are doomed [and] cannot be saved. But we have to think about new industries. How we can create some new jobs that will help us create…a financial cushion to take care of those who were left behind?

(Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Dan Costa: That was one of the points you make in Deep Thinking. AI presents an opportunity for us to be more human.I think we need to flesh that out and make people feel and understand.

Garry Kasparov: The McKinsey report of US job market in 2016 was a clear demonstration. How little creativity has been used?

Many of jobs we’re doing [are] repetitive jobs, raw jobs. Intellectual jobs can be also repetitive. They can be also easily executed by the machines far more effectively. Here, you come to the point as what we’ve learned from the games…of chess, from golf, from any other game, is as long as we have the framework created by humans, and we know what we’re doing, machines will do better.

We should just recognize that in every closed systems, machines will be superior. By the way, we don’t have to understand how they do that. That’s another mistake. We want explainability. Machines could do it in a very awkward way from our standards. The airplanes flying fast, and the bird was up flapping their wings. That’s why thinking that machines will outperform us even in errors of intellect, by doing something you understand is wrong. We should look for the results, and that’s the other problem for businesses because there are so many regulations that require them to explain what they’re doing, but explainability may not be there if you want to look for efficiency and productivity.

Dan Costa: You brought up the case on stage about Go, and the thing that made the Go AI so much more effective is when it taught itself how to play the game. It didn’t have a human-imposed rules.

Garry Kasparov: It’s the same as chess now. Again, it’s the future of human mission relations will be very much on own humans acting like shepherds because we will have to find a way to create these cool systems, the areas of narrow intelligence, where machines will do the job much better than any human. Then, to see how they connect. These areas of narrow intelligence to general field, to open-ended system. Again, it sounds easy, but I think that’s a great challenge because the room for humans and their relations with machines could be shrinking smaller and smaller. Even maybe last few decimal places, but it doesn’t matter. It could be far more effective because there’s so much power. The channeling it or changing the direction for 0.1 percent of a degree of this angle could have a massive, massive difference, a target one mile away.

Dan Costa: One of the things that worries me about AI is that good AI systems are driven by lots and lots of data and really great algorithms. If you look at whose got most of the data in this space right now, it’s big tech, it’s state governments. How do you see the role of the individual in this AI revolution? Because there seems to be some asymmetry of access to these new technologies, and different motivations.

Garry Kasparov: Yes. I couldn’t agree more. We have this problem and I think the public recognizes this problem but it’s still not enough pressure of the governments to actually impose very strict rules and very punitive measures on the corporations that are violating the privacy.

One of my concerns as chairman of Human Rights Foundation is that rules differ from democratic world to unfree world. I find it very troubling that these multinational giants—like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook—they apply very different rules to their customers in America or Europe, and to those who were not so lucky to be born in the free world and live in China, Russia, Turkey—where releasing the data from the social activities could literally be a matter of life and death. I think that’s step number one, but also we should recognize if data’s being produced, it will be collected.

I’m sure there are many ways that the governments could [just] limit the use of this data. Also, I think it’s the bonus of public side because after the Mark Zuckerberg testimony in the US Senate, which I found…was an amazing display of ignorance by US legislators. They couldn’t ask good questions for five hours; they had him in a hot seat and it was a waste. I didn’t see public outrage. Such a big opportunity has been missed.

The simple advice, “Let’s split them.” It’s not Standard Oil. If you just start dividing—and I hate monopolies—but then you’ll have many, many Googles with data spread around. We should find a way of empowering individuals. I don’t know [much about] blockchain technologies, but probably this is the way of actually helping people to control their own data and their own future. I think there’s still a moment where it’s the original concept of internet, social network. Now, all of a sudden, it’s social media. People just don’t recognize. It’s not a semantic difference.

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Dan Costa: It’s monetized in a totally different way.

Garry Kasparov: It’s about connecting people. It’s about the whole idea was how to bring us together. How to pawn the individual, to get access to data and to produce something which could benefit him or her and just being part of this global system. Social media is different, you are the target. You are now…the target for big corporations. How do we go back to this social network concept? I don’t have solutions, I confess my ignorance here about technical solutions, but I know that this is exactly the philosophy that’s the right question to be asked. I think the public doesn’t understand the seriousness of this challenge.

Dan Costa: You’re a Russian citizen…

Garry Kasparov: Also a Croatian citizen, I have an E-passport, that’s how I travel.

Dan Costa: …living in the United States, but you’ve written a lot about propaganda, and its effects and its powers, and how it’s being used by the Russian government. Here in the US, we now have a Facebook, Twitter, Google media universe that is almost like a private propaganda machine that can be accessed by governments, by individual companies. Again, as someone who has dealt with and understands these issues, what advice do you have for the United States? As we’re moving into this system where we can’t believe what we see online anymore.

Garry Kasparov: Look, I’ve been facing the rise of fake news industry and troll factories in Putin’s Russia from the beginning of this century. Roughly around 2004-2005, Putin’s propaganda experts, the KGB guys, they made a faithful decision of not following China by [creating] firewalls. But rather, creating the fake internet [and] websites that carry a lot of real information [mixed with] these poisonous pieces. Instead of having the front page of a proper newspaper, the story that everybody must follow, the party line, you could spread it in many pieces, in dozens of pieces. Put it in a package wrapped in a lot of true stories.

It’s not as simple as saying, Garry Kasparov is an enemy of the state. No, somebody’s saying Garry Kasparov is an enemy of the state, but then somebody else coming in saying no, but he was a great chess player, but probably now he was infiltrated by voice and propaganda. Somebody will say, no, no, no, he is a good guy. So the whole page of comments could be fake.

Dan Costa: The bots are arguing with bots.

Garry Kasparov: Bots and they’re very good at this, so that’s why one day when Putin attacked American US elections, he really had more than 10 years of experience of these industries. Working in Russia, in neighboring countries with big Russian communities in eastern Europe, in western Europe.

In my book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, [from] 2015, I said that it was just a matter of time. It’s not if, but when and where he would attack. Because again, they already built this machine and it’s relatively cheap. It’s still billions of dollars of investment, but compared to open military intervention, confrontation…it’s relatively cheap. And also, it fit Putin’s KGB mentality, his KGB background, spying background. So instead of open confrontation, he always looks for an opportunity to infiltrate. That’s classic Judo methods, you use the strengths of your opponent against him. For Putin it was brilliant because it was western technology and the free world, and you could use it to undermine the very foundation of the free world.

Dan Costa: Do you have any advice for how to get out of this situation? Because it seems like it’s happening, it hasn’t really stopped.

Garry Kasparov: No, and it will not stop. For anyone who has unlimited expertise, the answer is obvious. Defense is a losing proposition. In cyber security, you can build the defenses, but at the end of the day the only answer is deterrence. It’s like the Cold War, like it or don’t like it, it’s a cyber Cold War. We are under constant attacks by Putin or other enemies of the free world. Whether that’s states like Iran, or North Korea, or China, or quasi-state organizations that also use the same methods.

Only deterrence could actually stop these attacks, or limit them. Because they will understand the consequences of being over-aggressive. Trying to protect our weak spots here and there, it’s important that we build some defenses. It’s important that we raise the awareness of the public about threats, but it’s not going to work. As for the fake news industries, there are many challenges within our free society, that enabled the fake news industry. It’s about a fear of partisanship, it’s about the absence of a dialogue between people with different ideological views that helped Putin, and other enemies of the free world, to use the fake news to engulf this gap.

Dan Costa: So, you’re working with Avast now, a company that PCMag readers are very familiar with. What advice do you give to consumers for how to raise their defense level?

Garry Kasparov: As for individual level of defense, that’s very easy. The first message is to the owners of smart homes. I was a little shocked because even at this South by Southwest, I talked to a lot of people, people with good expertise [who] don’t understand how vulnerable the smart homes are today.

[In the] American household, 39 million have at least one vulnerable device. People don’t understand that one vulnerable device makes the entire smart home vulnerable. Because the strengths of your defense pyramid depends on the weakest link. One bad apple makes the whole pack rot.

Most of the problems are created by manufacturers of traditional home appliances—washing machines, coffee machines—because there’s no expertise in building digital systems. But they have to do it now. At a very low cost, because it’s a price competition, but they want to be part of the system. Most of the systems just don’t have adequate defenses. I think we need…government oversight, [and] we need to put pressure to force [companies] to meet certain standards.

But [we] also to have to provide separate manuals, because nobody reads 100-page manual. At page 85, you read something about this digital stuff, people don’t read it. Most of them use default mode, which is of course an open invitation for a hacker. I think it’s very important people will start doing what I call digital hygiene, because we wash our hands, we brush our teeth, we do it automatically. It doesn’t save us from some serious illnesses but 90 percent of problems can be avoided. Same with our mobile connected devices, we still should protect ourselves from viruses, but many things could be done by demonstrating that we care about it because it’s as important as our health.

Dan Costa: So I want to ask you the three questions I ask everybody that comes on the show. Is there a technology trend that concerns you and that keeps you up at night?

Garry Kasparov: No, I’m an incorrigible optimist. I worry about bad people, not about bad technology because every technology has a dual use. You can build a nuclear reactor but before unfortunately you build nuclear bomb. It’s quite unfortunate that destruction is easier than construction. That’s why in history we always know, that a new, disruptive technology has been tested for some sort of damage.

Dan Costa: Are you not worried that the same thing will happen to AI? I will be used to destroy before it gets used to create?

Garry Kasparov: Again, it’s not about killer robots. It’s about bad guys, bad actors behind it. People will say oh, we should think about ethical AI. AI could not be more ethical than its creators. I don’t understand what it means, like ethical electricity. If we have bias in our society, AI follows it. It sees a disparity, whether it’s racial, it’s gender, or an income disparity. It takes it into account; AI is an algorithm based on odds. So somehow, complaining about ethical AI is like complaining about a mirror because we don’t like what we see there.

Dan Costa: Is there a technology that you use every day that still inspires wonder?

Garry Kasparov: No. For me, the real wonder of the world is access to information. Since I can collect data, it makes it easier. I grew up in the Soviet Union, and the information was scarce, there were not many books. Now, the fact is that I can [read anything on a] Kindle…it just makes me feel good. There’s so much technology that surrounds us now that helps us to get better. Also, what’s amazing, people keep complaining, oh what can we do? There’s nothing new that can be invented…and I say wait a second. You look at this device in your pocket, let’s go backwards in 1976 or 1977, the Cray supercomputer was like a miracle. This device is what? Ten thousand times more powerful?

Dan Costa: More powerful than the space shuttle.

Garry Kasparov: Exactly. We have so much power, and…I want us to start dreaming big again. Because we have these opportunities now. I feel so sorry about the Space Race, we stopped space exploration, deep-ocean exploration. Let’s go back, let’s try to do big things. Four years ago, I did a commencement speech at Saint Louis University in Missouri. Addressing the graduate students I said look, you have to revive the spirit of exploration, especially because St. Louis is the gate to the west, and, today it’s safer to fly to Mars than for Columbus to cross the Atlantic. Because, at least we know the distance and we have the map. I hope our children, our grandchildren…will be more aggressive in their dreams, by using this phenomenal technology to push us forward because I think, let’s confess, let’s admit this important fact; our generation has been slowing down in our quest for discovering the wonders of the world, or space, or oceans.

 

SonyatSXSW | 2019 | “Can AI re-envision human creativity?” | March 10th, 2019

Garry Kasparov : the former chess grandmaster

Peter Stone : Professor at the University of Texas at Austin

Hiroaki Kitano : President and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.