George Zarkadakis

Why did they pick chess?

Skill at chess was considered a universal marker of intelligence.

white men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.

They had all this hope and optimism about how fast they could accomplish their sci-fi-inspired dreams of a sentient machine, a machine that could beat a human at chess.

But from the 1970s to the 1990s, it was a cycle of hype and disappointment.

The technology was just not there yet, and eventually the funding dried up.

Periods like this came to be known as AI winters.

I hesitate to use the term in part because outside of the United States, it was the 80s and 90s that really led to a burgeoning of AI research in other parts of the world, including both China and Russia.

So it may have been a winter in America, but it was a time of great creation and creativity in other parts of the world.

the early pioneers of the field had underestimated the complexity of humans and overestimated the capabilities of machines.

I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.

He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work.

In fact, he rejected the man and made the robot.

The word robot means worker.

It's a translation of the Slavic word for a serf, for a slave, for a servant.

It originated in the early 20th century.

Karl Capek's play R.U.R., Rossum's Universal Robots, who imagined the future and imagined artificial humans, and they were manufactured.

His sole purpose was nothing more or less than to prove that God was no longer necessary.

In 1920, decades before the Dartmouth Conference, before the atomic bomb, before the mainframe computer, Rossum's universal robots grappled with the costs and consequences of treating workers as nothing more than their parts.

It was an indictment of the exploitation and oppression that people had experienced for centuries in the name of progress, a mistake which, in the play, man was repeating with machines.