Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 42

AMLD2019 – Garry Kasparov: One-on-one with Marcel Salathe and Q&A with public | Jan 28th, 2019

The Applied Machine Learning Days channel features talks and performances from the Applied Machine Learning Days. AMLD is one of the largest machine learning & AI events in Europe, focused specifically on the applications of machine learning and AI, making it particularly interesting to industry and academia. Next edition will be held in January 25-28, 2020 @ EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Follow AMLD on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/appliedmldays

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/appl…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/appliedmldays/

AMLD Website: https://www.appliedmldays.org

AMLD2019 – Garry Kasparov: How Machine Learning Upgrades Human Creativity | Jan 28th, 2019

The Applied Machine Learning Days channel features talks and performances from the Applied Machine Learning Days.

AMLD is one of the largest machine learning & AI events in Europe, focused specifically on the applications of machine learning and AI, making it particularly interesting to industry and academia.

Next edition will be held in January 25-28, 2020 @ EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Follow AMLD

on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/appliedmldays

on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/appl…

on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/appliedmldays/

AMLD Website: https://www.appliedmldays.org

John Hopkins: Reawakening The Spirit of Democracy | March 14th, 2019

Reawakening The Spirit of Democracy – All-Day Conference https://t.co/Mz5vKEfh4Y

— Johns Hopkins U. (@JohnsHopkins) March 14, 2019

Garry Kasparov’s remarks:

“Thank you, and thank you all for being here today. My deep appreciation for our hosts, Johns Hopkins University and its President Ron Daniels, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Democracy is always in need of friends, and they are steadfast.

It’s been a little over two years since a few friends and I got together to discuss what we might be able to do to address the modern crisis of liberal democracy. We understood that although the moment was catalyzed by the election of Donald Trump, he was only a symptom of a disease that had been spreading for many years. The Renew Democracy Initiative is an attempt to find a cure.

Authoritarian regimes like Russia and China have become openly dictatorial at home and more aggressive abroad. Fragile republics like Hungary and Turkey have shifted to demagoguery and autocracy. Populists rule in Italy, while fascists and socialists have made gains across much of Europe. Bellwether democracies like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States are struggling with populism, xenophobia, and the rise of ideological extremism on the right and the left. Perhaps most concerning of all, the basic principles of liberal democracy, the individual freedom, the guaranteed rights, are under attack like never before. Civil disagreement has given way to contempt, to open hatred.

I have been forced to leave my home twice in my life. My family and I fled my birthplace of Baku, Azerbaijan, in the USSR when violent anti-Armenian pogroms began in 1990. In 2013, I realized I could no longer return safely to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where my opposition colleagues were being harassed, persecuted, and murdered with impunity.

It’s easy to say such things could never happen here, as the saying goes. The democratic institutions here are far stronger than those of the fragile, young Russian ones destroyed so completely by Putin. But decay does not happen overnight. It doesn’t begin with weak institutions or a corrupt executive. Those are the effects that reveal how weak the system has already become. It’s the result of years, of decades, of complacency, a shift in values, the abandonment of principles. It is the direct consequence of a steady decline in the responsibilities of being a member of a democracy, and of being a democratic nation in the world.

The Renew Democracy Initiative is dedicated to fighting back against that tide. As we did with our first project, the book Fight for Liberty, modeled on the Federalist Papers, RDI wants to educate those who have never learned about why democracy really matters—and to remind the many who have forgotten. We want to inspire a new generation to believe in the power of individual freedom and of free societies to create unrivaled prosperity and opportunity. This is never to say that America is, or has ever been, perfect. We must not whitewash our flaws if we hope to fix them. America’s strength has always been its ability to get better, and while it has recently taken a few steps back, we do say that America remains the best hope of revitalizing the spirit of democracy in the world—and to do that it must lead by example.

We understand that our emphasis on education and civics may sound too slow in a time of crisis. And I admit, I do consider myself someone who places a priority on thinking several moves ahead! But we do not shy away from the battles of the day. Our members advocate and agitate in lectures, op-eds, back rooms, boardrooms, and classrooms. We read books, we write books, but we also march in the streets and tweet! (Probably too much!)

We also know that a rush for short-term solutions will only make the problem worse. Extremism must not be met by equal and opposite extremism. Despite what you might see on cable news, there is room in the middle. There is room for respect, for cooperation, even for sanity! We must fight to defend that space and to expand it. We must use the moment to spark a rebirth of active and engaged citizenship. This must be a wake-up call for American democracy, not a death knell.

As we begin our next session of discussions, it is essential to remember that listening is not enough. We are here today in a temple of knowledge, a library in a hallowed place of teaching and learning. But today it must also be a place of action. Apathy and ignorance are not the only threats to the values of democracy today. They are under active attacks from the forces of dictatorship, of demagoguery and corruption and hate. If those attacks are not countered, we will have proved ourselves unworthy of the mantle of freedom. We will also have failed to defend those most in need of the protections and benefits of democracy and rights.

Do not be afraid. Do not be intimidated into silence—not by your enemies or your allies—or you will soon lose the right to speak at all. Please, I have lived through it twice and I do not want there to be a third time! This wonderful conference is a spark and we need your help to fan it into a flame. Go to RDI.org and join the Renew Democracy Initiative, spread the word online and off. Most importantly, spread the values you believe in. Thank you.

Two sides of the globe, one painful lesson: Trump is debasing America | NY Daily News | March 3rd, 2019

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE DAILY NEWS

No matter how low your opinion may be of President Trump, he’ll always find a way to lower it. On Wednesday, he outdid himself, breaking even the laws of physics by reaching new depths in two places at once. In Washington, Trump was revealed to be even more traitorous, venal and outright criminal than already assumed thanks to the congressional testimony of his long-time attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Just hours later, in Hanoi, Trump was forced to walk away from his latest love-fest summit with one of the world’s bloodiest dictators, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Cohen was as convincing as a confessed crook can be. It’s impossible to find an honest man to testify against Trump since he tends to surround himself with people as corrupt as he is. So we are forced to rely on their self-interest and the renowned lack of honor among thieves.

Unlike Trump’s convicted campaign chief Paul Manafort, who continued to lie and conspire against his own interest, Cohen is more worried about American justice than Russian killers. This is another reason I believe Cohen when he says he doesn’t know much about Trump’s Russia connections beyond the Trump Tower Moscow deal (in which the would-be American President’s company considered offering Russian dictator Vladimir Putin the building’s $50 million penthouse, free of charge).

If Cohen knew more, he’d say less.

Russia appeared elsewhere in Cohen’s testimony, if mostly indirectly. He confirmed that Trump heard from Roger Stone that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would release emails that would damage Hillary Clinton. Assange and WikiLeaks have been lockstep collaborators with Russian intelligence services for years and cannot be considered to act independently from Putin’s wishes.

Additionally, Deutsche Bank lent Trump hundreds of millions of dollars when no other institution would give him a dime. This is the same bank that was fined for laundering billions in Russian cash and was described by expert reporter Luke Harding as facilitating a “shuffle of money” between its business with Russians and its business with Trump. From Trump Tower to the hacked emails to the fishy loans to the polling data Manafort handed over to a Russian agent, the list of contacts and likely quid pro quos between Trump and Russia is long and growing. I believe the English term is “collusion.”

Cohen’s credibility was enhanced by his Republican interrogators, who debased themselves, their offices and Congress as an institution with their eagerness to attack one of the few people who can shed light on the threat Trump represents to the country. It is vital to understand what Putin extracted from Trump in exchange for keeping quiet about the Trump Tower arrangement and the Trumps’ many lies about it. But it was clear from the start that the Republicans weren’t interested in the truth, only in defending their Dear Leader.

They attempted to do this by calling Trump’s right-hand man a liar and a crook, as if those characteristics aren’t exactly why Trump relied on him for so many years. The GOP questioners didn’t even try to exculpate Trump, conceding that his actions are indefensible so the only hope is discrediting the messenger. The GOP isn’t angry with Cohen for lying to Congress in 2017 when he was doing it to defend Trump. They’re angry that he stopped.

In the U.S., lawmakers take an oath to defend the Constitution, not whoever happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, this was only the latest confirmation that the GOP is the party of Trump, not of conservatives and certainly not of the people. Just a day earlier, only 13 of 197 Republican members of Congress voted to block Trump’s spurious national emergency declaration. Democratic control of the House guaranteed its passage there regardless, but it remains to be seen if the GOP-controlled Senate has any interest in reasserting the legislature as the first branch of government, as the Founders designed.

The President has greater discretion in the foreign policy realm, power that Trump has used to weaken American alliances and empower autocrats around the globe. From kowtowing to Putin to downplaying the murder of a Saudi-American journalist, Trump hasn’t met an authoritarian he doesn’t like. (His administration’s laudable pressure on Venezuela’s Maduro is the exception that proves the rule. One can only assume that there are millions of barrels of ulterior motive involved.)

Trump’s wooing of murderous North Korean dictator would be inexcusable even if it achieved results. It hasn’t. Instead, Kim has received the global elevation all dictators crave by being treated as an equal by the leader of the most powerful free country in the world and given up nothing he cares about. His country is still a concentration camp of 25 million souls, and he knows the only reason he is receiving first-class treatment is because of the nuclear weapons he will never relinquish.

Just as Russia loomed over the Cohen hearing, Putin’s shadow was also present in Hanoi, with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov appearing right on time to claim that the “Americans are seeking our advice” on the negotiations. To be fair, if Kim listens to anyone, it’s likely Putin, who helped turn the North Korean missile program into a global threat in record time. As also seen in Afghanistan, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria, there is little Putin likes better than to create or stoke a conflict and then offer to assist in defusing it. It keeps him on the global stage and makes for good propaganda at home in Russia.

Putin has no real interest in de-escalation on the Korean Peninsula. He sells tech and fuel to North Korea against sanctions and gets slave labor and influence in return. Trump and Kim acting out a futile pantomime also strengthens Putin’s message that the United States has become a laughingstock, a paper tiger. It’s increasingly difficult to disagree. This latest American debacle in Vietnam couldn’t have ended in a more pathetic fashion without Trump clinging to the last helicopter out.

I suppose it’s true that Trump leaving Hanoi with no deal was better than making a bad one, but this is saying that drinking half a glass of poison is better than drinking a full glass. North Korea quickly disputed Trump’s reasons for abandoning the deal, and it is tragic that the words of a Stalinist dictatorship sound more credible than those of the U.S. President. Trump then added insult to injury by saying he took Kim “at his word” when he denied, preposterously, that he knew about the torture of American prisoner Otto Warmbier, who died soon after returning to the U.S. in 2017.

This revolting statement stung me especially hard, coming as it did on Feb. 27, the date my friend Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in Moscow four years ago. The likelihood that an American prisoner was abused without Kim’s knowledge is the same as the assassinations of Nemtsov or Jamal Khashoggi happening without the approval of Putin or Muhammed Bin Salman, respectively.

In none of these cases would anyone risk such a move without the leader’s sanction, if not direct instruction. This is the mafioso-style “code” Cohen spoke of in his testimony regarding Trump’s oblique instructions to lie and threaten. “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” from the top boss is as clear as a signed death warrant.

But Trump always believes what dictators tell him because he wants the same autocratic standard to apply to him. If it’s good, they want all the credit. If it’s bad, they knew nothing about it. The buck stops nowhere.

The message Trump is sending to the rest of the world is clear: The United States is an unreliable ally and an unworthy enemy. Hostile actors are tempted to act while allies are forced to consider their own plans instead of relying on collective defense. Such a trend foretells a return to the uncertainty and regional power struggles that turned the 20th century into a bloodbath.

Days that live in infamy are usually the result of attacks from abroad. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were met by unprecedented unity among Americans and their political representatives. The attacks today are largely internal, and self-inflicted. The greatest political scandal in American history is being met with denial and obstruction from Republicans, whose party once championed the rule of law. If asked what they stand for today, they can say only that they stand for whatever Trump says — and that they’ll sit and roll over for him, too.

Trump has been exposed for what he is, a thuggish con-man with no regard for decency or the law. He has declared moral bankruptcy nearly as often as financial bankruptcy. Yet the damage he is doing to the presidency, the standing of the United States, and the global world order is of greater consequence. The free world still requires U.S. leadership and strength against its many enemies. Trump’s reputation can never be repaired, but America’s reputation must be.

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.”

Donald Trump, master revisionist: What he said about Afghanistan, and what it says about him | Jan 4th, 2019

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT NY DAILY NEWS

There were many bizarre moments during President Trump’s cabinet meeting on Wednesday, but I’ll discuss just one that falls under my domain. Unlike the alleged leader of the free world, I prefer to speak from authority. Despite his claims of expertise on everything from foreign policy to campaign finance laws, every time Trump speaks off-script, the truth is revealed. He’s a Russian matryoshka doll of ignorance, with numerous layers of cluelessness wrapped up inside a total lack of self-awareness.

His response to a question about removing the American presence in Afghanistan took a strange turn when he started talking about the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979: “Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan.”

So far, not too bad. If Trump meant Russia is “there” as “in Afghanistan today,” that’s likely true, despite Kremlin denials of aiding the Taliban. Putin is always looking for chaos and to attack American and NATO interests. And Russia was formerly part of the Soviet Union, if not the entire thing.

There is no doubt that the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan contributed to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. It wasn’t so much a matter of economic strain, however, as the psychological blow. I remember the Soviet media’s best attempts at “mission accomplished” propaganda at the time, and it was far from a U.S.-leaving-Vietnam rush to the exits, but people knew a retreat when they saw one. The mighty Soviet military machine — the vanquisher of Hitler, the iron hand of Soviet control across a dozen time zones from Berlin to Chukotka — crawled home to a USSR that had been already shaken by low oil prices, Mikhail Gorbachev’s political reforms, and Ronald Reagan’s uncompromising stand against the “Evil Empire.”

By the time the Soviet Army returned in 1989, Soviet citizens who had never had a voice in national affairs were beginning to speak up. Occupied Warsaw Pact nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia wondered if the Soviet bear had become a paper tiger. The exit may have been different, but, for the USSR, Afghanistan resembled the American experience in Vietnam with its atrocities, corruption, millions in native casualties, and a shaken sense of national identity for the foreign power.

Trump’s curious tangent went off the rails with his next statement, “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” Here the history lesson seems to take a dark revisionist turn. Or was it just nonsense? Like professional art critics pondering the works of a kindergarten class, pundits tried to decipher this blatantly incorrect assertion.

Terrorists going into Russia wasn’t even part of the Soviet Union’s pretexts for invading Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviets went in to secure a much-hated pro-Kremlin Communist regime and to kill anyone who resisted. (The similarities with Vladimir Putin’s bloody efforts in Syria today are notable.) The only talk about insurgents was of the local mujahideen variety that was waging guerilla war against the brutal Communist government, with American aid.

As for being “right to be there,” the American President justifying the Soviet invasion of a neighboring country is very dangerous at a time when Putin is doing the very same thing.

Intent on vindicating his own hostile acts, Putin has been steadily rehabilitating the deeds of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet actions. After all, if the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan was wrong — it was officially condemned “morally and politically” in the USSR in December 1989 — what to make of Putin’s invasions of neighboring Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014? With that in mind, the puppet Russian parliament has prepared a resolution declaring that the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was lawful and just and is scheduled to vote on it on Feb. 15.

Just a coincidence? So where did the President get this idea that the Soviets were right to be in Afghanistan? Keen observers have noted that Trump’s Twitter rants regularly regurgitate talking points from Fox News morning shows, but unless I’ve seriously underestimated the show, upcoming Russian parliamentary votes and Soviet history aren’t much in the mix on “Fox & Friends.”

The only beneficiary of Trump making this wild claim is the person who originated it: Vladimir Putin. State-controlled Russian media are delighted to have the American President’s endorsement of the right to invade neighboring countries under the flimsiest of pretexts. Nor is this the first time Trump has shared an oddly specific non-sequitur in line with Kremlin talking points. Last summer he suddenly criticized new NATO member Montenegro, which was the target of a Russian coup plot in 2016.

With Trump’s open admiration for authoritarians like Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman, it’s nice to reminisce about a time when American leaders stood up to dictators instead of parroting them. Rarely heard in this context is the name of President Jimmy Carter, but it was the soft-spoken Georgian who led the international boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Contrast that with last year, when Russia hosted the World Cup despite its illegal annexation of Crimea and continuing invasion of Ukraine. There were no boycotts by the nations of the free world because there are no longer any leaders who think the free world needs defending. Trump’s remarks were historically illiterate, but they were also a failure of character. And that’s something that can’t be fixed only with history lessons.

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

The Data Dilemma | Avast Blog | by Garry Kasparov | December 30th, 2018

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT AVAST BLOG

AI expert Garry Kasparov explains the ugly truth of data security today and how we can turn the tide.

Thinking back to a recent day in November when I crisscrossed Manhattan as I often do—from a morning meeting to a midday lunch to my daughter’s school pickup—I pictured myself as a small dot on a map of the city grid. I might blink red for a moment here, then there, over the course of the day. Taken together, and cross-referenced with the other data I produce like phone calls, credit card transactions, etc., these points could easily be connected by lines tracking my movements to become a visual representation of my day’s activities.

I wasn’t thinking of some far-fetched science-fiction scenario. This exact kind of interactive graphic was used in the New York Times’ recent investigation into the way location apps collect user data from millions of Americans. The startling images show users being tracked in schools, hospitals, police stations, and homes, all without proper mechanisms for consent or oversight. The article has generated widespread debate, a vital first step in bringing about needed reform and regulation, but we cannot wait for well-timed exposés to drive our approach to privacy. Something this important demands we take a more proactive approach.

I’d like to first flag a key point in the report that I have written about here before: that we as individuals must be proactive in protecting ourselves online. We should not take the language offered up front by developers at face value. Often, the messages that ask for our consent when enabling location tracking omit crucial information about how the data will be used. Apple, for instance, only requires developers to stipulate a relevant use for the information, such as traffic monitoring or receiving local weather information. The fact that location data is then sold to third parties, from advertisers to hedge funds, is omitted from the text most consumers see. Instead, it is buried deep in highly technical privacy policies, where the average person cannot make sense of it—even if anyone bothered to read that far before clicking “Okay”. As a result, everyone should assume the worst when choosing to share data with developers; likely, it is going to be passed along, stored, and, no matter their intentions, potentially subject to hacking.

Another concern that I mentioned here earlier, one that perhaps gets less attention than it deserves, is the problem of security and accountability in smaller companies. Of course, we should continue to be wary of the familiar tech giants having access to troves of consumer data, but their lesser-known counterparts can often present even greater risks. Because they get less publicity, they may be more inclined to use data in questionable ways. They may also have fewer resources in place to apply strong security and privacy practices across their operations. These factors conspire to make putting sensitive data into the hands of smaller players a potentially greater danger than handing it over to a Google or Facebook.

Apple and Google, in particular, wield tremendous power as gatekeepers of their respective app stores, and, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Should they ban apps or entire companies when they violate privacy standards? After how many offenses? It’s easy to keep passing the buck and hope the public forgets before the next breach or story. There is a glaring lack of common standards and regulations to enforce them.

Another worry I have, which has not yet gained traction in the conversation, is the way in which artificial intelligence will intensify and accelerate these threats. Today’s algorithms are already powerful when it comes to triangulating common denominators from disparate data points. They will only get smarter and faster over time, and if we continue feeding them more and more data, the consequences can become dystopian rather quickly. I’m always quick to point out that there will also be much good produced by AI finding hidden connections and causations, especially in health data, but the dark side cannot be ignored. Algorithms that know more about us and our behavior than we do ourselves are too powerful to go without oversight. At the very least, there must be accountability for abuse.

The measures companies are taking now to protect consumers from privacy breaches are inadequate in the face of AI’s capabilities today, let alone in the foreseeable future. Companies might say they protect their users by avoiding collecting data such as names, emails, and addresses; obfuscating data to make it less precise; or deleting it after a period of time (often after passing it along to advertisers). These are all piecemeal methods that still leave users highly vulnerable. Much of the missing data can be easily reconstructed to become personally identifiable and a major security risk. We need to develop better solutions, while also being mindful that the technologies at our disposal are simultaneously being used to develop better ways of breaching those solutions. We’ve already seen 3D printed heads get around facial recognition locking systems, and AI-generated fingerprints fool biometric scanners.

Clearly, the answer is not solely in upgrading to the newest, most advanced security protocols. In fact, the latest cool security device is often the most vulnerable because it is relatively untested in the real world. The most important thing is restoring the simplicity of settings and clarity of choices, as untrendy as that sounds. I recently discussed how defaults matter more than anything. The best security measures are completely irrelevant if they are not turned on. Companies must explain up-front, in language that the average person can understand, what he is signing up for when he enables location services, or any setting for that matter.

The tech companies that provide platforms for developers should mandate the use of such straightforward disclaimers, rather than allowing for vague or misleading disclosures. And legislators must do their part, too, not simply put on a display of outrage when the private sector falls short of expectations. If we faced an epidemic of violent bank robberies, the public would demand that law enforcement step in instead of just blaming the banks. In the same way, legislative bodies and the Federal Communications Commission should be held at least partly responsible for failing to defend consumer data.

As always, individual security does not exist in a vacuum. We are simultaneously part of larger systems that can be monitored, hacked, manipulated. We have seen this clearly as the investigation into 2016 election interference continues. The latest Senate report provides unprecedented detail in explaining how Russian actors exploited U.S. social media platforms. From the oft-mentioned Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to the smaller Tumblr, Vine, and Reddit, the effort was comprehensive and sophisticated, carefully targeting groups such as African-Americans and with messages designed to influence their voting behavior.

In these revelations, it has become clear that any indifference on the part of tech companies is seen as an opportunity by hackers and propagandists. The arena of social media has become the latest battlefield between democracy and authoritarianism, and its architects can no longer feign ignorance or helplessness when it comes to solving the problem. Meanwhile, the latest revelations about Facebook selling access to private messages makes me wonder how much worse hackers are than the company’s own business model. Mechanisms for proper use, that protect the individual and promote the values of society more broadly, must be built into the structure of the system. And yet, as we rightly demand these actions from the corporate sector and the regulators, we must demand the same of ourselves—by being thoughtful, informed consumers of the products that shape our digital world.

Chess, a Drosophila of reasoning | Science Magazine | December 7th, 2018

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT SCIENCE MAGAZINE

The recent world chess championship saw Magnus Carlsen defend his title against Fabiano Caruana. But it was not a contest between the two strongest chess players on the planet, only the strongest humans. Soon after I lost my rematch against IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, the short window of human-machine chess competition slammed shut forever. Unlike humans, machines keep getting faster, and today a smartphone chess app can be stronger than Deep Blue. But as we see with the AlphaZero system (see pages 1118 and 1140), machine dominance has not ended the historical role of chess as a laboratory of cognition.

Much as the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly became a model organism for geneticists, chess became a Drosophila of reasoning. In the late 19th century, Alfred Binet hoped that understanding why certain people excelled at chess would unlock secrets of human thought. Sixty years later, Alan Turing wondered if a chess-playing machine might illuminate, in the words of Norbert Wiener, “whether this sort of ability represents an essential difference between the potentialities of the machine and the mind.”

Much as airplanes don’t flap their wings like birds, machines don’t generate chess moves like humans do. Early programs that attempted it were weak. Success came with the “minimax” algorithm and Moore’s law, not with the ineffable human combination of pattern recognition and visualization. This prosaic formula dismayed the artificial intelligence (AI) crowd, who realized that profound computational insights were not required to produce a machine capable of defeating the world champion.

But now the chess fruit fly is back under the microscope. Based on a generic game-playing algorithm, AlphaZero incorporates deep learning and other AI techniques like Monte Carlo tree search to play against itself to generate its own chess knowledge. Unlike top traditional programs like Stockfish and Fritz, which employ many preset evaluation functions as well as massive libraries of opening and endgame moves, AlphaZero starts out knowing only the rules of chess, with no embedded human strategies. In just a few hours, it plays more games against itself than have been recorded in human chess history. It teaches itself the best way to play, reevaluating such fundamental concepts as the relative values of the pieces. It quickly becomes strong enough to defeat the best chess-playing entities in the world, winning 28, drawing 72, and losing none in a victory over Stockfish.

I admit that I was pleased to see that AlphaZero had a dynamic, open style like my own. The conventional wisdom was that machines would approach perfection with endless dry maneuvering, usually leading to drawn games. But in my observation, AlphaZero prioritizes piece activity over material, preferring positions that to my eye looked risky and aggressive. Programs usually reflect priorities and prejudices of programmers, but because AlphaZero programs itself, I would say that its style reflects the truth. This superior understanding allowed it to outclass the world’s top traditional program despite calculating far fewer positions per second. It’s the embodiment of the cliché, “work smarter, not harder.”

AlphaZero shows us that machines can be the experts, not merely expert tools. Explainability is still an issue—it’s not going to put chess coaches out of business just yet. But the knowledge it generates is information we can all learn from. Alpha-Zero is surpassing us in a profound and useful way, a model that may be duplicated on any other task or field where virtual knowledge can be generated.

Machine learning systems aren’t perfect, even at a closed system like chess. There will be cases where an AI will fail to detect exceptions to their rules. Therefore, we must work together, to combine our strengths. I know better than most people what it’s like to compete against a machine. Instead of raging against them, it’s better if we’re all on the same side.

Garry Kasparov’s End of the Year Message.

Hello my friends, and welcome to the close of another busy year. My main areas of professional activities—artificial intelligence and tech, Russia, global politics, and human rights, and promoting chess—have all raised their profiles in 2018. And while it might surprise those who only read the headlines, there is much to be optimistic about on every front. Yes, it’s true, as my recent New Yorker interview was titled, that I am “an incorrigible optimist,” but I also base my evaluations on a concrete analysis of the position!

There are many links below to my recent articles and activities, so I will summarize here by saying that several of my long-held positions have become conventional wisdom. It can be frustrating to see how long it took the mainstream to reach my conclusions, especially regarding Putin, where many lives (and perhaps an election or two) could have been saved. But in the global exchange of ideas, the goal is to have your beliefs win out, sooner or later, whether you receive credit or not.

In AI, the public has long been swayed by the doomsayers and their headline-grabbing predictions of apocalypse and terminators. I’ve poked many holes in these self-defeating dystopian visions, and, based on my many invitations to speak at companies conferences, my message of tech optimism and ambition is increasingly convincing. My deepening affiliation with Avast Software has augmented my expertise and my arguments, and I enjoy discussing the vital nexus of rights, security, and tech in my blog there. How well we resolve these issues will define our lives for a generation. My analysis of the exciting machine learning program AlphaZero is important for understanding the next paradigm of how humans will work with our increasingly intelligent machines. We’re not being replaced, we’re being promoted!

The geopolitical scene is fraught with danger, it is true. Putin and Trump are increasingly desperate men who control nearly the entire world’s nuclear arsenal. And yet, even here I am confident that our path trends upwards. The American political system is rusty but is showing that it still works. Wake-up calls must be loud to be effective! Russians are increasingly unhappy with Putin, who may lash out, but the world is now alert to the danger he presents—even if belatedly. The Renew Democracy Initiative, which I founded in New York last year with many brilliant colleagues, has led to collaboration with people on all sides of politics who give me hope for a near future of unity and sanity.

The Kasparov Chess Foundation continues its work promoting my beloved game in classrooms around the world. Aside from its intrinsic benefits for kids, building the grassroots is the best way to support the sport in the long run. Speaking of that, the Grand Chess Tour crowned its champion just last week in London, American Hikaru Nakamura. And we just announced an expansion for 2019, with new events in Croatia, India, and Côte d’Ivoire. I returned to the board myself in my annual appearance in St. Louis, now more for fun than for results. Let’s just say that my efforts to promote chess have had more success than my own efforts at the board, so I’ll call my chess year a draw!

I’m an optimist because I believe the future is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no destiny beyond our control. If we believe our technology can help us build a better society, we will do it. If we believe democracy and human rights are essential for everyone on the planet, we will make it so. It takes patience, but also action and ambition and creativity. We cannot rely on wishes for the future. Let us build the future we want and make our dreams real by our deeds.

Best wishes and Happy New Year!

Trump first: U.S. foreign policy is now in the service of one man | December 2nd, 2018

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE DAILY NEWS

President Trump’s body flew to Argentina for the G20 meeting of national leaders on Friday, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. If Trump’s Twitter account is a Fitbit of his mental health, his latest flurry of panicky tweets about the Mueller investigation looked like nervous breakdown.

Trump was so agitated that he first confirmed, then canceled, his planned reunion with Vladimir Putin in Buenos Aires, ostensibly because he disapproved of Russia’s attack on Ukrainian ships in the international waters near Russian-occupied Crimea last week. Trump had previously shrugged off the Russian attack, so it seems unlikely that the Azov Sea is much on his mind these days.

Putin’s turn to piracy cannot compete with the ongoing White House spectacle, which now stars Trump’s long-time personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. His guilty plea is further proof of my assertion that Trump’s team has a far higher crime rate than any of the immigrant or refugee groups he demonizes.

Among other things, Cohen revealed that, despite their many denials, Trump and his family were still heavily involved in a Moscow Trump Tower project in 2016, when his campaign was receiving Russian assistance. This points to new avenues for perjury charges and exposes yet another conflict of interest. During the campaign, the real Trump motto was apparently Trump First, not America First. The open question is if that has changed at all during his two years as President.

A few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, I said in an interview that Trump’s ability to generate attention and chaos was what Putin liked most about him. “There will be a crisis every day” was my assessment, which has turned out to be far too conservative. Every hour brings a new scandalous statement, indictment or revelation about Trump or a member of his administration.

It’s too much for the media and the public to keep up with, and whether that’s by design or not (it’s not), it’s an effective way of keeping the spotlight on Trump all the time. This may not matter in 2020 if the Mueller “witch hunt” continues to collect scalps, but it’s good to remember how Trump exploited this method to dominate his rivals for the Republican primary.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this stream of new crimes and misdemeanors regarding Trump’s Russia connections is that Putin has known it all the entire time. It’s impossible to imagine that the former KGB colonel hasn’t used this damning knowledge of Trump and his family’s many lies for leverage.

Not a friend. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

Regardless of the motive for the cancellation, I’m glad we have been spared, for now, another Putin-Trump photo-op. What legitimate business do they have to talk about face-to-face at this point? Congress and the White House have applied significant sanctions to Russia for its belligerence against Ukraine and for attacking the U.S. election, but Trump himself has remained steadfast in his refusal to criticize the one man entirely responsible for it all.

Meanwhile, Putin needs these summits to legitimize his status as a big boss, a vital task for any dictator. His supporters don’t like the penalties Putin’s leadership has brought down on them, but they are also convinced that he is the only one who can ever hope to rescue them. They might lose that hope and turn against him should Putin ever be effectively isolated and condemned on the world stage, as he should be. But Putin will never be treated like a pariah while nearly everyone believes he has the U.S. President in his pocket at least until Jan. 20, 2021.

Foreign policy is the traditional siren song of an American President embattled domestically, a chance to wield unmatched prestige and power as global statesman and commander-in-chief. Certainly, there are plenty of areas where American leadership is much needed at the moment, including Putin’s war on Ukraine and the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Instead, Trump has continued to abdicate the fading tradition of American moral leadership on matters large and small. He and his administration have continued to defend the Saudi crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, despite the CIA’s assessment that he gave the order to murder journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident.

Trump siding with a brutal dictatorship against his own intelligence services should sound quite familiar since it matches exactly how he responded to the news of Russia’s election hacking.

“Who are you going to believe,” Trump tells his followers over and over, “me or the facts?”

The two main beneficiaries of Trump’s endless good faith, Bin Salman and Putin, had good reason to laugh and smile when they shook hands in Buenos Aires on Friday. Their wars are progressing, their critics are dead, and they are welcomed among the leaders of the free world without a care.

That may be changing thanks to the American people, who awoke from their traditional midterm slumber to overwhelmingly deliver the House of Representatives to the Democrats. The Republicans kept narrow control of the Senate thanks to a favorable election slate, but rest assured that everyone up for reelection in 2020 now knows the dangers of being seen as too closely allied with Trump.

I am a member of no party, I hasten to say, although I was especially glad to witness the departure of Putin’s favorite Congressman, Orange County Republican Dana Rohrabacher. He was defending Putin long before Trump made it fashionable in the GOP, and there is no doubt he finally paid a political price for these connections.

Most importantly, some balance has been restored to the U.S. government, and the impact is being felt even before the new blue House has convened. Last Wednesday, the Senate voted to end U.S. military support for the Saudi’s genocidal campaign in Yemen. Despite Trump’s initial waffling, the White House felt obliged to put out a strong statement supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity and condemning Russian aggression, although it was missing the only part Putin cares about — what the consequences will be if he continues.

Ukraine and Yemen are far away from the United States, as are Taiwan, South Korea, Israel and other nations that are threatened by authoritarian regimes or terrorist groups. The U.S. has defended them for decades not just out of the goodness of American hearts — although there is much to be said in favor of that American love of an underdog, especially from this former Soviet citizen.

Aiding Ukraine against Putin’s aggression isn’t charity, it’s an investment in the stability of Europe and all economic benefits stability produces. Standing up to a homicidal Saudi prince isn’t gallantry; it puts his regime and those of his neighbors on notice that their actions will have consequences — and those actions include murdering journalists and sponsoring terrorist groups who always have the U.S. and Israel at the top of their list of targets.

Democracy isn’t just some abstract concept, it’s your own way of life. When the nations of the free world fail to defend and promote democracy and human rights abroad, that indifference inevitably comes home to roost. There is also the pragmatic motive, since democracies, for all their debates and differences, do not make war on one another. As well-understood by past Presidents of both parties, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, the best long-term security plan for the United States is the global spread of democracy and prosperity.

When the U.S. shrugs its mighty shoulders at the murder of thousands, as in Ukraine, Syria and Yemen, or the assassination of one brave man like Khashoggi, the message to dictators and thugs is to do as they like. The idea that the U.S. should only care, or act, when its own vital interests are directly attacked is based on the perilous delusion that it’s best to wait until the pot boils over before turning off the fire.

Failing to protect innocent lives abroad makes Americans less safe. Failing to defend human rights in other places puts those same rights at risk at home. It’s also a vicious cycle, as autocratic leaders in turn use Trump’s attacks on refugees and journalists to justify their own.

As Truman explained in 1951, when the U.S. was getting involved in Korea, you stand up in small conflicts so you don’t have to fight bigger ones. Making it clear that aggression is unacceptable is not escalation, it’s deterrence, the foundation of Truman’s successful Cold War strategy that saved South Korea from Communist slavery and that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.

Even the humblest leader cares about his legacy, often to a fault, and it’s not necessarily unhealthy for a President to occasionally wonder how the history books will treat him. The strength of the democratic world order is its continuity, the ability to pass principles and policy to the next administration, the next generation. Today’s hyperpartisanship is wrecking that strategic strength as each side pushes further to the extremes, undoing the work of the previous administration and overcompensating toward the other extreme.

Trump not only doesn’t care about the next generation, he doesn’t seem to care about anything other than his personal image in the present day. President Obama fulfilled his mandate to begin America’s retreat from the world after the costly overreach of his predecessor. Both George W. Bush and Obama are decent men who loved their country, even if they had very different views of what America’s role in the world should be.

It is fair to say we are paying the price of both of their views going too far — Bush’s interventionism causing chaos and Obama’s hurried retrenchment creating power vacuums filled by the likes of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Mistakes were made. They were mistakes, however, made with the best interests of the country and the world in mind. Today we are seeing all too well what happens when the world’s most powerful nation is instead led by a man who cares only for his personal interests. Instead of being guided by the values of the Founding Fathers, Trump has the moral compass of a YouTube comments section. America First is bad enough, Trump First is a catastrophe.

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

New Yorker Interview: Kasparov on Putin, Trump, and how we are living again through the eighteen-fifties. | December 4th, 2017

Garry Kasparov Says We Are Living in Chaos, But Remains an Incorrigible Optimist

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORKER

Garry Kasparov has won more than two dozen world chess titles, emigrated twice, and launched movements to oppose two Presidents. Born in Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, to an Armenian mother and a Jewish father, Kasparov fled that city when anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in 1990. He was twenty-seven years old and had held the world-champion title in chess for five years; he was famous and, by Soviet standards, wealthy. He chartered a plane to Moscow and took nearly seventy people with him.

Kasparov announced his retirement from chess in 2005, when he was still ranked No. 1 in the world, and declared that he would devote himself to politics. He started a movement called The Other Russia, a broad coalition united in its opposition to President Vladimir Putin. After a series of street protests and a failed attempt to put Kasparov on the ballot for the 2008 Presidential election, the movement sputtered along until the mass protests of 2011–12, in which the movement’s activists—and Kasparov personally—played a key role. In the political crackdown that followed the protests, Kasparov was forced to leave Russia.

He now lives in Manhattan; when he is not travelling for his many speaking engagements, he works in coffee shops. His latest political movement started over coffee, too. Called the Renew Democracy Initiative, it was formed by an ideologically diverse group of journalists, academics, and Kasparov, soon after the 2016 American election; signatories to its manifesto include Laurence Tribe, William Kristol, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Last month, the group published a collection of essays, called “Fight for Liberty,” in which members call for a centrist effort to reinvigorate liberal democracy. On the eve of its publication, Kasparov sat down with me at a coffee shop in Manhattan. (I have known Kasparov socially for a dozen years, and have written about him and his work in books and articles; I have also participated in his Free Russia Forum.)

This interview has been translated, from the Russian, and edited for length.

This is your second attempt at creating a broad opposition coalition.

We are asserting that some things are more important than ideological disagreements. The difference is, in Other Russia there were people who accepted our values out of necessity, whereas Larry Tribe and Bill Kristol don’t have a difference of opinion on what democracy is.

What is democracy?

It is the existence of democratic institutions that enable different people to express their points of view within a legal framework that sets the boundaries of the political process. That’s a very rough definition. We have suddenly discovered that this framework is on the verge of a breakdown. The system of institutions that functioned for two and a half centuries has rusted through, and we have to figure out how it’s all going to work in the twenty-first century. The book that we have just published is an expression of our collective consciousness, an attempt to show that these traditional democratic values can be adapted to the demands of the twenty-first century.

How long did it take to feel that you know this system and understand its institutions well enough to take a stab at reinventing it?

I’m not really reinventing it. But, (a), I have been living here long enough now, and, (b), I have always been interested in the political constructions of the world. You have to know when to act. Trump’s election was a catalytic event because a huge number of people realized that they have to become a part of the process, they have to vote, they have to protest.

I am fortunate to have friends on different sides of the political spectrum. I have another advantage: I am not an American citizen, and I can’t run for office. So, as the chairman of this organization, I cannot be suspected of trying to use it to advance my own political career. I am also difficult to place politically. I guess you could describe me as center-right, but, at the same time, I am a social liberal, and I have a lot of issues with the politics of the right.

The two-party system is doomed. It makes the world look too simple, too black-and-white. What’s happening with the G.O.P., and what I suspect will be happening to the Democrats, are reactions to the fact that the rainbow of people’s views in the twenty-first century cannot be fitted into two political parties. Some people remain loyal to the party structure, but those who think more actively start saying, “Wait a second, that’s not what we are about.”

We are living through the eighteen-fifties, in some sense. The Democrats split into the North and the South, and this reflected the main issues. But it’s instructive to look at how the Whigs split into Republicans and Know-Nothings. An anti-immigration party! A new political system was being born, even if it did revert to the two-party system. There have been some mighty third-party efforts since: in 1892, in 1912. The system was more complex until it was reduced to a total two-party algorithm. Though, at a few key points, a third force made a difference. In 1968, Wallace ended up helping Nixon by taking votes away from Humphrey. And there was 1992, and 2000—

And 2016.

Of course. It happens more often than people think. And now the model is crumbling. Europe has been undergoing this process for longer. It didn’t have a two-party system, but it had the socialists and the conservatives, and everything revolved around that. Now we see that disintegrating even in the most stable of societies, such as Sweden.

We have entered a period of chaos. Putin didn’t invent the chaos. He just sort of helped it along. Like any dictator, he is an opportunist. There is a war in Syria? Excellent. Obama has washed his hands of it? Great: I go in, displace people, they flee to Europe, this creates problems, the right rises.

They had been practicing for this since 2004–05. The Internet structures designed to influence people’s minds were under construction in Russia for ten years before they decided to meddle in the American election. [2004–05 marked the years of the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, and of a series of protests called the Marches of the Dissenters, organized by the United Civil People’s Front, which was co-founded by Kasparov; both of these developments alerted the Kremlin to the potential of Internet-based organizing.]

I suspect that they made a conscious decision to create not a Chinese-type system of blocking access to information but its opposite: a flood of information. They created a deluge. For example, they create entire troll debates. You think that there is an argument raging on the Internet, when in reality it’s a script.

When a political system is unstable, something like this can play a serious role. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that Putin would decide that, since he has been able to influence Holland, England, Germany, and Italy, to say nothing of Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria, he would try his hand here. But everyone subscribed to the traditional mistaken belief that Putin is a regional player. Considering the resources Putin has, it was obvious that sooner or later he would challenge the world’s strongest country, because that’s his way to demonstrate his own invincibility.

How well thought-out do you think this strategy was here?

At first they were using Trump mostly as an icebreaker. They expected Hillary to win and wanted to discredit her completely. Trump was the perfect vehicle for discrediting not only Hillary but the entire electoral system. Putin’s great advantage is that, unlike Soviet propagandists, he is not selling an ideology. I call him the merchant of doubt. His message is, We are shit, you are shit, and all of this is bullshit. What democracy? Trump was the ideal agent of chaos.

Trump kept saying that the election will be rigged. This was the Kremlin line. I think their main script was that Hillary would win in a close battle and #ElectionIsRigged would be a hashtag that would discredit her. She would be paralyzed. She’d be facing a Republican congress, which would immediately begin impeachment proceedings.

And then they saw that they had a shot at the jackpot. In its last stages, the campaign changed. They started using WikiLeaks when they sensed that they had a chance of getting Trump into office.

At the same time, Putin held his annual Valdai Club meeting for foreign experts on Russia, and that year it was designed to build bridges with the Hillary Clinton Administration they were anticipating.

Some things take time, even in a dictatorship. Valdai was planned ahead of time. And I’m not saying they had any certainty. Hillary was their main expectation. But they saw that they had a chance. They are card sharks. They stow an ace up their sleeve and keep playing the game.

Later, they thought that they may be able to pull off something even bigger. If you analyze what was happening between November and January, during the transition period, you will see that they were getting ready for a grandiose project. Henry Kissinger played a role. I think he was selling the Trump Administration on the idea of a mirror of 1972, except, instead of a Sino-U.S. alliance against the U.S.S.R., this would be a Russian-American alliance against China. This explains the Taiwan phone call. [In December, 2016, Trump spoke on the telephone with Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, breaking decades of protocol and earning a rebuke from China.]

But it all went off the rails on December 29th, when Mike Flynn called the Russian Embassy. Flynn is a few weeks away from becoming the national-security adviser. And still he calls the Russian Ambassador. He calls to say, “Don’t do anything in response to the sanctions the United States has just imposed.” [The Russian foreign minister, Sergei] Lavrov has already announced that Russia will match the sanctions, Cold War–style: the U.S. has expelled thirty-five people and taken away two buildings, and we are going to do the exact same thing. And then Putin, effectively renouncing Lavrov, says, “You know what, we are starting a new life. We are not expelling anyone, and we are inviting American diplomats’ children to our New Year’s celebrations.”

A dictator can’t afford to look weak. He can act this way only if he is absolutely certain that Flynn is speaking for Trump. This means they trusted Flynn absolutely. The were sure that they were going to win in this situation.

Are you perhaps overestimating their intelligence? You are assuming that they had good reasons for trusting Flynn.

Let’s not underestimate Putin. He follows K.G.B. logic. Remember, when several countries expelled Russian diplomats, Putin went tit for tat. I think he even expelled a Hungarian. And yet he didn’t respond to the Americans that time. He was expecting to win big.

My conclusions come from looking at Kissinger’s trip to Moscow and, from what I see, his long-standing connections to Gazprom. It was obvious that China was being distanced and Trump was ready to give himself over to Putin. They were readying the ground for denouncing nato Article 5. This is the picture I get when I add it all up.

So why did it go off the rails?

I think it was the F.B.I. They knocked Flynn out, and then it wasn’t going to work. [On January 12, 2017, the Washington Post reported that Flynn had called the Russian Ambassador. The report was apparently based on an intelligence leak—the F.B.I. had been listening in on Flynn’s conversations with the Ambassador.] It turned out that the American political system has a certain reserve of stability; ironically, this stability is currently guaranteed by the intelligence services and the Pentagon. While the Republican Party has given itself over to Trump, the institutions that were always suspected of dictatorial tendencies are the ones resisting dictatorship. I think that at that stage they opted for all-out sabotage.

And that was about the time when you decided to step in.

I realized that we had to set some of our disagreements aside, because the very framework in which we could have these disagreements was under threat. I recently read Churchill’s book about the interwar period, “The Gathering Storm.” He talks about how the Western world stood by and watched as the forces that led to the catastrophe grew in Germany, but also in the U.S.S.R. and Japan and Italy—they kept thinking that it would just dissipate.

How useful do you find comparisons to the nineteen-thirties?

Why wouldn’t they be useful? Historical comparisons are always contingent and can be slippery, but they are necessary because they enable us to understand the nature of mistakes. Everybody says, “How can you compare Putin to Hitler?” But which Hitler? The Hitler of 1936? Sure you can.

What are the similarities?

Hitler was a respectable politician in 1936. Attempts to boycott the Olympic Games in Berlin had failed. Everyone came. It’s important to remember that Hitler had not always been as he was in 1941. Any dictatorship, including the Stalinist one, is formed over time. It’s not a military coup. It’s a gradual press.

In 1935, when Hitler decided to take over the Saar Basin—perhaps if France had sent a military division there, things could have gone differently. A dictator never asks, “Why?” He asks, “Why not?” Putin is also annexing territories gradually. He tests the waters. He didn’t venture into Syria right away. The chemical attack in 2013 was a sort of test. It showed that he can intervene there.

Ukraine was also a test. [Immediately following the Olympic Games in Sochi, in February, 2014, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, occupying the Crimean Peninsula and establishing a puppet separatist regime in the eastern part of Ukraine.] That went over just fine. Putin’s dictatorship is different from twentieth-century dictatorships in that it is driven primarily by money. It’s not imperialism in its purest form. He doesn’t have the desire to attack and conquer everyone. He has no ideology. He sows chaos: break up nato, break up the European Union, create chaos in America. In the end, he is concerned only with maintaining his own power, and his own power depends on demonstrating his might and uniqueness to his own guys, his own henchmen and cronies.

What do you think of comparisons between Trump and Putin?

Their backgrounds are different. Putin is not a public person; he is a K.G.B. agent. He is underhanded in everything he does. Trump acts openly and brazenly. Sure, he has to disguise things, but he does that by piling on lies and fake information. I think Trump envies Putin his ability to do things that Trump can’t do by definition. Putin doesn’t have to be concerned with the media or with parliament. Trump resents wasting his precious time on speaking to the press. And then he has to push things through, lobby for them—all that takes time. I think the way Trump acts around dictators comes from his feelings of a sort of inferiority: he’d like to be like them, but he can’t. If he is reëlected, it will be a tragedy—nothing will rein him in.

What specifically are you worried about?

He will do what he wanted to do and hasn’t been able to yet. He can destroy nato. He can push the situation to the point of chaos.

You started by talking about institutions that are not holding up. But a lot of people are looking around and saying, “It’s been two years and the institutions are still standing.” What do you think?

That they are still standing shows that they were built well. But we have learned many things, such as how much of the institutional cement is actually tradition. In everything Trump does, he uses the loopholes of the system, and we see how many of them there are. Many things began long before Trump—for example, the shift of power from the legislative to the executive branch.

The Supreme Court situation is extremely dangerous. When Trump said that he would stick with Brett Kavanaugh all the way, I wrote that his saying so was a small problem; the big problem is that Kavanaugh will stick with Trump all the way. For the first time we have a Supreme Court Justice, a fairly young one, who is not only partisan but loyal to the President who appointed him. Now imagine the following setup: Democrats have taken Congress and have started investigating Trump and issued a subpoena for his tax returns, which is something they can only do on national-security grounds. Trump challenges the subpoena, and the Supreme Court issues a 5–4 decision. Is that going to be legitimate? Imagine any 5–4 decision involving Trump in which Kavanaugh casts the decisive vote.

The Supreme Court is the institution that saved America in 2000. Everyone realized that the election was a dead heat, but the court decided. Now imagine a repeat of 2000 in 2020. What will happen in the streets? How can this institution pass final judgment?

Distrust in the system is growing. It’s important that Kavanaugh was confirmed by fifty votes that represent forty-four per cent of the country.

So there seem to be three things you want to reform: the two-party system, the balance of powers, and the federal system.

It’s not that I want to reform them. Let me put it this way: a country that has legitimately elected Trump has to consider its political system. How could Trump have won an entirely legal election? If I’d suggested this was possible three years ago, people would have laughed at me. But something is going on.

Something besides Russian interference?

Absolutely. Putin gave things a nudge, but the process was under way. And it may be that we are lucky it was Trump. It might have been someone worse, with more-rigid ideological concepts. Trump’s goals are ultimately personal: he is a businessman. He has no ideology that could plunge the country into a long-term catastrophe.

I was just leafing through a book called “The Wonderful Future That Never Was.” It’s a collection of articles from Popular Mechanics, from 1903 to 1969. People were predicting so many different things—the country was boiling over with ideas. Now try reading what people are saying about what will happen in ten or twenty years. We have gone from utopia to dystopia. Trump is a reflection of our unconscious, in a way. People fear the future, and then a man comes along and says, “I’ll take care of everything.” We have to find a way to restore our spirit of exploration.

You are raising two children here now.

Three of my children are here, but Polina, who is twenty-five, is a graduate student in philosophy. So I am raising two, yes.

They are twelve and three. Are you not afraid of the future?

I am an incorrigible optimist by nature. The future is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe this firmly. I am fervently in favor of resuming space exploration. We have to start living in the algorithm of exploration again. That’s what made this country what it is, and the world, too.

What made you move to New York?

I moved here permanently in February, 2013. I had to. [My wife] Dasha and I had been living here sporadically since 2004. We had a place here. Aida was born here, in 2006. We were paying taxes here. But, when you get a call from the Investigative Committee [Russia’s central detective agency], asking you to come be interviewed as a witness, you realize you have to give it some thought. The late Boris Nemtsov knew this well, so he used to say, “When you enter as a witness, you exit as a suspect. If you exit at all.” Too bad he didn’t heed his own advice. [Nemtsov, a Russian politician and Putin opponent who had been threatened repeatedly with prosecution, was assassinated, in Moscow, in 2015.]

What was the investigation?

It was one of the cases stemming from the protests of 2011–12. I happened to be abroad when we got the call, and I never went back.

Soon after, you started the Free Russia Forum, an organization for political activists in exile.

In December we are going to hold our sixth conference, in Vilnius, Lithuania. You say that it’s an organization of exiles, but it’s actually about fifty-fifty: émigrés and people coming from Russia. I am always amazed at the civic courage of the people who come from Russia, because this is a gathering that Channel One covers as a congress of the enemies of the people.

It’s still growing. Marat Guelman is starting to organize a culture track. [Guelman is an art curator and former Putin campaign strategist living in exile in Montenegro.] Ideally, this sort of discussion would be happening in Russia. We organize a live broadcast so that people in Russia can watch something that they ordinarily can’t access. We talk about the sanctions. This time we are going to talk about the church schism. We talk about Putin’s wars. We talk about how the state should be constituted and we discuss the mistakes of the past. It’s important to look back on the last twenty-five years. What happened that led to the 1993 Russian Constitution, which virtually made Putin inevitable? We need these kinds of discussions so that if a window opens up—as I think it will—we have an accumulation of intellectual capital that will allow us to avoid making the same mistakes.

What kind of window do you see opening?

Dictatorships fall unexpectedly. There are many things that can go wrong: we don’t know which way the Syrian conflict will go, and the sanctions are starting to make them feel the squeeze, and the oligarchs are malcontent, and the country is reforming the retirement system.

The church schism is a very serious topic. In effect, it constitutes the end of the Russian concept of religious autocracy. An 1686 decree guaranteed Russia’s primacy in the Orthodox world. Now Ukraine, Belarus, and a couple of Russian regions are splitting off—they are returning to Europe after three hundred and thirty years.

In other words, Russia is being isolated. The world’s attitude toward Putin has finally changed. You can see that when the minister of defense of the Netherlands says that they are in a state of cyberwar with Russia. England has stopped just short of saying that. And even in America, Trump hasn’t proved to be that useful: sanctions keep putting the squeeze on. I’m not saying the sudden collapse of the system is going to happen tomorrow—it might take a year or two, but less than five, I’m sure.

I recall that when you and I spoke in 2006, you were sure that the system was at the edge of collapse.

There was one thing I couldn’t predict, and that’s the amount of money that flowed into Russia following the financial crisis of 2008. The West addressed the financial crisis by printing a giant amount of money, and a lot of that money went to Russia, as payment for oil. Also, to be honest, I had overestimated the West’s ability, or, rather, its desire, to intervene in Russia. Back in 2007 it was still possible to influence Putin. He wasn’t yet the Putin of 2014. Russia was more integrated into the world.

Then there was 2011. One of the reasons the protest movement choked up was that there was no discord in the élites. Élites split when they can see that the rest of the world wants change. But in reality the world didn’t want things to change. And now the outside world itself is unstable.

But don’t you think that the reason no cracks appeared in the élites has to do with the nature of a mafia state, which makes everyone dependent on the don?

I don’t think things were so clear in 2011. How dependent were these people? They keep their money in the West, after all. I can imagine a scenario in which things would have worked out differently. But that would have required more decisive action on the part of the protesters.

If you had to do it over again, as one of the leaders of the protest, what would you have done differently?

I think we had a chance on December 24th. [On December 24, 2011, more than a hundred thousand people came out in Moscow and in dozens of other cities and towns around Russia, comprising the third and largest protest in three weeks.] The special forces were hiding out in the pedestrian underpass. No one was prepared to take responsibility for dispersing the protesters. In Moscow we had a hundred and twenty thousand people in the street. We had the option of laying siege to the building of the Central Election Commission and demanding that election results be annulled. Another was the Maydan option. [Maydan means “square” in Ukrainian. Kasparov is referring to protests in Kyiv, in 2004 and in 2013–14, when months-long occupations of the city’s main square succeeded in toppling the government.] I think we could have gotten ten thousand people to stay.

Instead, we went on holiday break. Leaders of the protests took their planned vacations; I came to America to see my kids. Our mood was, We’ll come back and come out again. We should have maintained the revolutionary momentum. On February 4th, we had an even bigger crowd, but, by that time, they were prepared for it. They’d plugged up all their holes, put a stop to any internal boat-rocking. They did their job, and we didn’t do ours.

They cracked down, but now their scorched-earth approach is going to backfire. Whatever protest comes next, it will be spontaneous and will come out of nowhere, or everywhere at once. And it will seem like all of that is happening without the opposition doing anything, because they’ve eliminated the opposition. The thing is, young people keep coming out to protest. They’ve forced me out of the country, they’ve killed Boris Nemtsov, they’ve been jailing Alexey Navalny. And still things are happening. That means there are things that people want that the regime can’t give them.

You really are an incorrigible optimist.

I’m not saying that I know how it ends. I just said that the system is unstable. That doesn’t mean that things will be good tomorrow. There are different ways they can play out.

I believe that anything is better than Putin because that eliminates the probability of a nuclear war. Putin is insane. He is an aging paranoid dictator who may be losing power. Anyone who replaces him, any new system, however ugly it may be, will aim to reach some understanding with the West. They have their financial interests, if nothing else. The greatest danger today stems from Putin, both because he is uncontrollable and because his staying in power serves to encourage the worst impulses of all the Saudi, Arab, and other dictators. So, if Putin goes, that will be a positive.

Back in Russia, you had a team of bodyguards and you consumed only food and drink that had been kept securely. Do you feel safe here?

Safe? No. But what can I do? I walk the streets but I don’t have tea with strangers. And I don’t accept invitations to countries where the government may be motivated to make a friendly gesture toward Putin. I get enough invitations to countries where I’m not under threat.

Tell me about your chess work.

That’s the fun part. Fortunately, in America there is a city called St. Louis. And there is the Sinquefield family, and Rex Sinquefield, whose Saint Louis Chess Club spends millions of dollars a year to promote chess. There is a children’s chess boom in America. You don’t see it on television but it’s there. I work with them a lot. Twice a year I hold sessions for gifted children.

I want chess tournaments to be a commercial enterprise and chess to be a professional game. For now I feel optimistic. I play a little bit when I go to St. Louis. But I realize that I can’t compete with the leading chess players today.

Are you doing them a favor by playing?

No, I enjoy playing. It’s a place where the chess culture is like it used to be in the Soviet Union. Everyone there respects the game. That makes me feel comfortable playing there, even if I know that I can no longer win.

How does the greatest chess player in history feel being unable to win?

You can’t really maintain the level of concentration. I can play a strong chunk of a game, or I can win one game in a beautiful way. But, on the whole, that’s not my life anymore. You can’t come from a different life at fifty-five and beat a thirty-year-old, or even a forty-year-old who does nothing but chess. I’m an amateur, and I feel comfortable with that.

Masha Gessen, a staff writer, has written several books, including, most recently, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.