Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Praise

      Dedication

      The Rise of the Centaurs

      We, the Memorious

      Public Thinking

The New Literacies

       The Art of Finding

       The Puzzle-Hungry World

       Digital School

       Ambient Awareness

       The Connected Society

       Epilogue

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       The Rise of the Centaurs_

      Who’s better at chess—computers or humans?

      The question has long fascinated observers, perhaps because chess seems like the ultimate display of human thought: the players sit like Rodin’s Thinker, silent, brows furrowed, making lightning-fast calculations. It’s the quintessential cognitive activity, logic as an extreme sport.

      So the idea of a machine outplaying a human has always provoked both excitement and dread. In the eighteenth century, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir¹ with his clockwork Mechanical Turk—an automaton that played an eerily good game of chess, even beating Napoleon Bonaparte. The spectacle was so unsettling that onlookers cried out in astonishment when the Turk’s gears first clicked into motion. But the gears, and the machine, were fake; in reality, the automaton was controlled by a chess savant cunningly tucked inside the wooden cabinet. In 1915, a Spanish inventor unveiled a genuine, honest-to-goodness robot² that could actually play chess—a simple endgame involving only three pieces, anyway. A writer for Scientific American fretted that the inventor “Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind.”

      Eighty years later, in 1997, this intellectual standoff clanked to a dismal conclusion when world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in a tournament of six games. Faced with a machine that could calculate two hundred million positions a second³, even Kasparov’s notoriously aggressive and nimble style broke down. In its final game, Deep Blue used such a clever ploy—tricking Kasparov into letting the computer sacrifice a knight—that it trounced him in nineteen moves. “I lost my fighting spirit,”⁴ Kasparov said afterward, pronouncing himself “emptied completely.”⁵ Riveted, the journalists announced a winner. The cover of Newsweek proclaimed the event “The Brain’s Last Stand.”⁶ Doomsayers predicted that chess itself was over⁷. If machines could outthink even Kasparov, why would the game remain interesting? Why would anyone bother playing? What’s the challenge?

      Then Kasparov did something unexpected⁸.

      The truth is, Kasparov wasn’t completely surprised by Deep Blue’s victory. Chess grand masters had predicted for years⁹ that computers would eventually beat humans, because they understood the different ways humans and computers play. Human chess players learn by spending years studying¹⁰ the world’s best opening moves and endgames; they play thousands of games, slowly amassing a capacious, in-brain library of which strategies triumphed and which flopped. They analyze their opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as their moods. When they look at the board, that knowledge manifests as intuition—a eureka moment when they suddenly spy the best possible move.

      In contrast, a chess-playing computer has no intuition at all. It analyzes the game using brute force; it inspects the pieces currently on the board, then calculates all options. It prunes away moves that lead to losing positions, then takes the promising ones and runs the calculations again. After doing this a few times—and