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The author is a writer and senior fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research.
On May 11, 1997, in New York, Garry Kasparov struggled to conceal his anxiety before a packed audience and live television cameras. The Russian chess grandmaster, regarded as one of the greatest players in history and world champion from 1985 to 2000, was facing an unusually formidable opponent: Deep Blue, IBM's chess-specialized supercomputer.
Kasparov had already defeated Deep Blue the previous year, winning three games with two draws and one loss. It had not been easy, but he remained confident. When the two met again in 1997, however, the machine had evolved. After five tense matches, the score stood at one win, three draws and one loss. In the decisive sixth game, Deep Blue played white and took the initiative.
Kasparov chose the Caro-Kann Defense in an attempt to regain control. Deep Blue responded aggressively, sacrificing a knight to tear through his defenses. The match ended in shock. Only 19 moves into the game, Kasparov resigned.
The result stunned the world, including Kasparov himself. Immediately after the match, he argued that several of Deep Blue's moves appeared "too human," raising suspicions that another grandmaster might have assisted the machine during play. For years afterward, he reflected on the defeat with bitterness.
"It was a deeply humiliating experience," Kasparov later said. "I was representing humanity against a machine, and I lost. It still hurts when I think about it."
Yet Kasparov's loss proved not to be an ending, but the beginning of something larger. Today, ordinary smartphones possess more computing power than Deep Blue. Even the ancient board game of Go, long considered a final bastion of human intelligence, fell in March 2016 when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Korean Go master Lee Se-dol.
AI has since advanced beyond games. AI systems can now write essays, generate paintings and compose music with increasing sophistication. Tasks once believed to require uniquely human creativity are no longer beyond the reach of machines.
Kasparov himself has also reconsidered the meaning of that historic defeat. In a 2024 interview, he reflected on the match differently from how he had in the immediate aftermath.
"In 1997, I thought it was a curse," he said. "Now I think it was a blessing, because I became part of something truly special."
That "special event" continues to unfold today. Humanity is living through the transformation that Kasparov first confronted across a chessboard nearly three decades ago. The speed and scale of AI's advance suggest that the debate surrounding it can no longer remain superficial. More serious and deeper discussions are becoming unavoidable.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.