Kasparov
Article
Kasparov is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 04, 2023 and January 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Kasparov spoke in front of the public library”; “For about ten years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov”; “you get to be this generation’s Kasparov”. It most often appears alongside A16Z, ACX, Alexander Alexandrov.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 04, 2023
- Last seen: January 20, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- A16Z (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander Alexandrov (1 shared issues)
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- Alice Evans (1 shared issues)
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- Ascended Economy (1 shared issues)
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- Asimov (1 shared issues)
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- basketball (1 shared issues)
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- Berlin (1 shared issues)
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- Blindsight (1 shared issues)
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- Business Insider (1 shared issues)
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- City of Leningrad (1 shared issues)
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- Communism (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
On Garry Kasparov’s anti-Putin campaign:
Kasparov was not just agitating for his point of view; he was also attempting to gather and spread information, turning himself inyo a one-man substitute for the hijacked news media. He grilled local sympathizers about the situation in their region, then passed this information on. His chess player’s memory was invaluable: according to one of his assistants, he had never kept a phone book, because he could not help remembering every phone number he heard. Now he was constantly aggregating and averaging in his mind. He kept a running tally of the percentage of local taxes each region was allowed to keep, the problems opposition activists faced, and details of speech and behavior he found telling. Now that local and national media existed only to spread the government’s message, information had to be gathered in this piecemeal manner.
In Rostov, where Kasparov spoke in front of the public library - he had been scheduled to speak in the library itself, but it had been shut down, under the pretense of a burst pipe - a young man approached his assistant, gave her his business card, and said he wanted to participate as a local organizer. When I asked his name, he said “That’s impossible, I’ll get fired immediately.” As I later learned from Kasparov’s assistant, the man was an instructor at a state college.
Will AIs And Humans Merge? This is the one where I feel most confident in my answer, which is: not by default. In millennia of invention, humans have never before merged with their tools. We haven’t merged with swords, guns, cars, or laptops. This isn’t just about lacking the technology to do so - surgeons could implant swords and guns in people’s arms if they wanted to. It’s just a terrible idea. AI is even harder to merge with than normal tools, because the brain is very complicated. And “merge with AI” is a much harder task than just “create a brain computer interface”. A brain-computer interface is where you have a calculator in your head and can think “add 7 + 5” and it will do that for you. But that’s not much better than having the calculator in your hand. Merging with AI would involve rewiring every section of the brain to the point where it’s unclear in what sense it’s still your brain at all. Finally, an AI + human Franken-entity would soon become worse than AIs alone. At least this would how things worked in chess. For about ten years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, “teams” of human grandmasters and chess engines could beat chess engines alone. But this is no longer true - the human no longer adds anything. There might be a similar ten-year window where AIs can outperform humans but cyborgs are better than either- but realistically once we’re in the deep enough future that AI/human mergers are possible at all, that window will already be closed. In the very far future, after AIs have already solved the technical problems involved, some eccentric rich people might try to merge with AI. But this won’t create a new master race; it will just make them slightly less far behind the AIs than everyone else.
Inline links: this is no longer true
1: METR is an organization that tries to measure AI vs. human performance. They need to measure some humans to set the baseline, specifically in software engineering, cybersecurity, and ML tasks, and are looking for contractors with experience in these fields. Pay is $100/hour base rate plus bonuses for performance; time commitment is ~16 hours before the end of January. Remote contracting job, very flexible, and you get to be this generation's Kasparov. See here for more information, or go here to apply directly.