In 1996 Garry Kasparov, then world chess champion, beat IBM’s Deep Blue in a match in Philadelphia. In the 1997 rematch in New York, the upgraded machine beat him - the first time a computer defeated a reigning world champion under tournament conditions. Two decades later, at TED2017, Kasparov gave a talk titled “Don’t fear intelligent machines. Work with them” in which he reflected firsthand on what that loss meant.
His message was not bitterness but acceptance and a reframing. Chess, he argued, turned out to be “crunchable” by brute force once hardware was fast enough and the algorithms good enough; Deep Blue was, by the standard of its output, an intelligent chess player, but a narrow one. Rather than treating the defeat as the end of human relevance, Kasparov urged people to face their fear of capable machines and then work alongside them.
He is associated with exactly that idea: “advanced chess,” sometimes called centaur chess, in which a human paired with a computer can outplay either alone. Kasparov’s account is valuable precisely because it comes from the person on the losing side of the most famous human-versus-machine match in history, told in his own words rather than through commentary about it.
Why business readers should care: the man who personally lost to a machine concluded that the productive response was collaboration, not competition - a useful frame for anyone deciding how to deploy AI alongside skilled people.