IT IS STILL “DEEP BLUE”

Now, that all the hullabaloo has calmed down from the defeat of the world chess player Kasparov, to the IBM computer, “Deep Blue”, and the dust from this earth shattering shock has settled down a little, consequently leaving a cleaner and clear-cut vision, let us try and analyze the significance of this happening.

Kasparov himself considered the match as a confrontation between man and the computer, an arm wrestle, between the creature and its maker. And to make matters worse he got quiet annoyed when he realized there was a Russian flag on his side of the board and one of the United States on the opposite side.

The majority of the chess followers, fans and analysts also fantasized this clash under a Manichean prism, from where there could be no doubts as to who would be the winner. That is why the reality of defeat was particularly painful to many of them. All over there was astonishment and perplexity: “The machine has beaten the human being!” “The computer will dominate the world!” “Humanity has been defeated!”

If a computer has beaten the best chess player in the world, then we can securely affirm that a machine can, in fact, play chess better than the most experienced human being. Further still, that the machine can have more intelligence than a human being, at least more intelligence to play chess. This evidence brought about the disapproval and indignation of many. This, however, demonstrates two things:

That the ability to play chess is an exclusive product of the development of the intellect, and that this intellectual capacity is only restricted to the environment of matter. Precisely because it is exclusively linked to matter, it is possible to transfer an analytical intellectual capacity to a materially designed and perfected object, which is in this case a machine especially made to achieve this aim. A “cold intelligence,” capable of tirelessly analyzing 200 million possibilities per second, demonstrates that it is more efficient than an intelligent person, who has been trained for decades to carry out this specific activity of playing chess, and we naturally judge ourselves to be more superior than a stacked up (well arranged) bunch of silicone circuits.
That in face of the reigning perplexity of the victory of the machine shows how humanity, in general, has inextricably enslaved itself to the intellect, considering it as its most precious asset. For if it were not so, the comments would be much different. Nobody would give so much importance to the defeat by a machine in a test that only required intellectual ability.

The computer won a test that just demanded reasoning, the spirit was not required and it is exactly that that makes a human being what he is. Deep Blue does not have the capacity to sense right or wrong. It does not have free will. It is unable to love. It does not have an unstoppable impulse inside itself to find out what it is, what it does on Earth and who made it… It is a dead object, as a well-humored journalist put it, it was not even capable of commemorating its victory.

But the human beings that for a long time now have buried their spirits live, as well as the voices of their spirits - the intuition, under the excesses of an intellect ever more tyrannical, really believe that humanity was defeated by the machine.

And, nevertheless, who defeated today's intellectualized human being was the intellectualized human being himself and this process has taken place already for thousands of years, when he started to consider his intellect, a mere terrestrial instrument of the spirit, as his most important and valuable asset, even more valuable than his own spirit.

It can be said that the majority of humanity has committed a long spiritual suicide, debasing himself gradually, through his own will, until he has reached this present stage which little differs from that of the animals, only realizing that he has surrounded himself by terrestrial things.

Deep Blue demonstrated to the majority of present day human beings, slaves to their intellect, the sad and insignificant role that they act out today in Creation. Beings full of intellectual arrogance, and at the same time so poor in spirit, capable of being shaken by the defeat in a test that did not demand anything other than technique, which never had nor ever will bring life by itself.