The scariest thing about Garry Kasparov's encounter with Big Blue was Kasparov's brain. It is not the sort of thing we often get a chance to see so clearly.
On one side of the chessboard was a 2,800 pound IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer rigged with more than 500 microprocessors capable of analyzing about 200 million chess positions every second. And on the other side sat a man who looks pretty much like any one of us, except that-he isn't one of us.
Kasparov's brain lives in that same intense ether of human achievement that also gave us Mozart's notations, Einstein's calculations and the colors seen only in Monet's mind's eye. Normally, we appreciate such genius merely by gawking. But by pitting himself against Deep Blue-with all these parallel processors crunching all the imaginable gambits a small army of grandmasters could pour into it Garry Kasparov let us sense the power and potential of our kind.
That on any given day Kasparov might win, lose or draw with Deep Blue hardly matters. Deep Blue's face-off with history's greatest chess master was an event redolent of optimism and hope. Which is to say we're not inclined to lose much sleep over mankind's impending prostration before machines of its own devising. But so far that has indeed been this event's metaphor-men battling machines for "control." Ultimately, it's a wasteful, destructive notion.
This is Sierra-Club thinking. It is technology as threat-cold, inanimate and inherently meriting our suspicion. Poor Kasparov is driven to his knees by the faceless technicians behind Big Blue's curtain; this is high-tech via Hollywood. It is the world of Robocop, Frankenstein or the Terminator, who at film's end is reduced to a single, metallic clawed hand, preprogrammed microprocessors driving it forward to destroy two helpless humans.
That may be entertainment, but the presumably more rational world of politics and policymaking has contributed to the fear, often creating in the late 20th century a climate of almost pre-medieval spookiness about science and technology. In this country, it destroyed the nuclear power industry and turns courtrooms into cauldrons of scientific superstition; across Europe people cower today at the hobgoblin of bioengineered foods. Alarmed at the growth of these phobias, the New York Academy of Sciences not long ago convened a symposium on them and published its papers in a valuable collection titled "The Flight From Science and Reason."
IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue does not exist to conquer or humble the world's chess champion. Deep Blue, or massively powerful technologies similar to it, are typically used today to discover new drug therapies by sorting quickly through hundreds of chemical combinations that once re quired months of human tedium.
The creation of Deep Blue, in short, is a marvelous human achievement. Its creators deserve our admiration. That it took so many of them so long to combine such awesome computing power in a way that could stand up to one human genius is reason on all sides for humility-an occasionally useful virtue in times such as these.
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