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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 29, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Deeper meaning for Deep Blue victory

By Hillel Cohen

Why did a chess match get almost as much media attention as soccer's World Cup?

Because this was no ordinary chess match. The match that ended May 11 was a major commercial sporting event with a big cash prize.

The contestants were the challeng er-a chess-playing computer called "Deep Blue"-and world champion Gary Kasparov. Deep Blue won.

Computers have been programmed to play chess for decades. But this was the first time a computer beat the world champion in a regulation match.

Deep Blue is named after its owner, IBM-the computer giant known as Big Blue on Wall Street. The match was a huge publicity stunt to showcase IBM's potential for "massively parallel process ing" supercomputers that can process 200 million chess moves in a second.

There is no big market for world-class chess-playing computers. But there is a huge potential market for parallel-processing supercomputers, of which Deep Blue is a model. The Pentagon and military contractors are eager for such machines to take on projects like Star Wars, code breaking and nuclear-war simulations.

The publicity for Deep Blue was worth many, many millions--perhaps billions-of dollars in potential contracts for IBM. It was also a great boon for IBM's worldwide reputation as a leader in computing and military technology.

That explains the Deep Blue-Kasparov match, and all the attendant publicity.

But the match took on other meanings. For some, for example, it was like the legendary contest of a hundred years ago between John Henry and a steam drill.

According to legend and song, John Henry was a Black railroad worker who was one of the strongest and fastest at drilling through rock with a steel rod and sledgehammer. When the railroad introduced the steam drill, it threatened the jobs and livelihood-let alone the pride and honor-of the "steel-driving men."

In a daylong contest, John Henry beat the steam drill. But he died. The steam drill could just keep on going; a human being couldn't.

The legend of John Henry became a symbol of the challenge automation and the industrial revolution posed to the working class.

Machines are the private property of capitalist owners. So they can seem like the deadly enemy of workers. Instead of saving effort and easing workers' burden, machines are used to intensify exploitation.

Workers tending machines can be made to work even longer hours than hand work would allow. At the same time, new technology reduces the number of workers necessary for production even as the volume of production rises steadily.

With the industrial revolution, overproduction-that is, producing more goods than can be sold at a profit-became a regular part of the capitalist system. With overproduction came economic crisis and unemployment.

A new wave of reindustrialization and automation has taken place in the last 20 years. Computers and robotics are its core technology.

Relatively cheap compared to the huge industrial machinery of an earlier era, computerization has helped the capitalist class wring out much greater profits from workers' labor. Automation has eliminated many clerical, communication and other jobs that until recently had not been as vulnerable to automation as had manufacturing and manual labor.

So the question arises whether Gary Kasparov will be known as the John Henry of mental labor. After all, his final defeat in the match may have been from exhaustion, after three long, intense games.

Gary Kasparov as John Henry? Hardly.

John Henry was an oppressed worker. He represented his class against the steam drill and its capitalist owners. But Kasparov is an anti-communist, well-paid supporter of the capitalist class.

Kasparov became a chess expert with the support of the socialist workers' government in the former Soviet Union. But early on he joined the pro-capitalist enemies of socialism and became the darling of the imperialist media.

Technology, socialism & capitalism

The former Soviet Union and the other workers' states produced a great many of the world's great chess players, as well as world-class athletes. Before being broken up by imperialism and internal reaction, these socialist countries used state resources to encourage and support millions of young people to participate in all sorts of mental and physical sports and cultural pursuits.

This created a much bigger pool of talent from which champions could emerge. It is the main reason the socialist countries dominated the Olympics even though they had fewer resources overall.

The same was true for industrialization and automation. In the hands of a socialist-oriented society with a planned economy, machinery helped improve workers' lives instead of rendering them jobless. Unemployment was unknown.

For this reason, the imperialists, especially the U.S. ruling class, were determined to limit the workers' states' access to technology, even if it meant a loss of sales. Not long ago, it was illegal for a U.S. citizen to sell even a small computer to the Soviet Union. The big-business ruling class was determined to monopolize technology as a weapon against the world working class.

Today, Deep Blue is a real threat to humanity. But it does not threaten humanity's pride in the ability to think and create. On the contrary, Deep Blue is a testament to human creativity. People created Deep Blue.

Still, in the hands of capitalists like IBM, computers are a threat to workers' jobs and living standards. Deep Blue holds an additional threat because its likely use will be to design weapons systems for the Pentagon.

But the system of capitalism and private ownership of technology cannot and will not last forever. Once they pass into the hands of the working class, powerful computers like Deep Blue can be used to help organize production and distribution-and thus improve living conditions all over the planet.

Perhaps called "Deep Red," such computers will be welcomed as tools of human progress rather than feared as foes.

It is up to the world working class to take control of Deep Blue, IBM and all of society to make that happen. Workers and oppressed peoples: It's your move.

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