Selected 100 classic TED talks, each 8-15 minutes long, covering topics such as innovation, growth, and future trends. Offers MP3 streaming, downloads, and English transcripts to help improve listening and speaking skills. Ignite your learning passion with the power of ideas! Here is the content of this issue's 【TED】100 classic speaking and listening materials collection. Consistent accumulation brings your English closer to real life!

This story begins in 1985. At age 22, I became the world chess champion after beating Anatoli Corpoff. Later that year, I played what is called a Simultaneous Exhibition against 32 of the world's best chess-playing machines in Hamburg, Germany. I won all the games. At that time, it was not surprising that I could beat 32 computers simultaneously. For me, it was the golden age. My hair was strong that week. Just 12 years later, I was fighting for my life against a single computer. In a match called by the cover of Newsweek, the Braze Last Stand. No pressure.

From mythology to science fiction, human versus machine has often been portrayed as a matter of life and death. John Henry, a still-driving man in an African-American folk legend, raced against a steam-powered hammer bashing a tunnel through mountain rock. His legend is part of a long narrative pitting humanity against technology. This competitive rhetoric is now standard. We are in a race against machines, in a fight or even a war. Jobs are being eliminated. People are being replaced as if they had vanished from the earth. It’s enough to think that movies like The Terminator or The Matrix are non-fiction.

There are very few arenas where the human body and mind can compete equally with a computer or robot. I wish there were more. But it was my blessing and curse to become literally the proverbial man in the man-versus-machine competition still talked about today. In the most famous human-machine competition since John Henry, I played two matches against the IBM Supercomputer, the Blue. I won the first match but lost the rematch the following year in New York. Fair enough. There is no special calendar entry for those who failed to climb Mount Everest before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. In 1997, I was still the world champion when chess computers finally came of age. I was Mount Everest, and the Blue reached the summit. But it wasn’t just Blue; its human creators, Anantharaman, Campbell, Hone, and Sue, guided it.

As always, the machine’s triumph was a human triumph. Something we often forget when humans are surpassed by our own creations. People were victorious. But was it intelligent? No, not in the way Alan Turing and other computer science pioneers had hoped. Chess could be solved by brute force once hardware was fast enough and algorithms smart enough. By output definition, Grandmaster-level chess, Deep Blue was intelligent. Yet, even at 200 million positions per second, Deep Blue provided little insight into human intelligence. Soon machines will be taxi drivers, doctors, professors, but will they be intelligent? Better leave that to philosophers and dictionaries.

When I first met Deep Blue in February 1996, I had been World Champion for over 10 years. I had played 182 World Championship games and hundreds of other top-level matches. I knew my opponents and myself. I gauged moves and emotions by body language. Then I sat across the board from Deep Blue. I immediately sensed something new, unsettling. You might feel this the first time you ride a self-driving car or face a new AI manager at work. Technology leaps forward. I lost that game. Could it be invincible? Was my beloved game over? These were human doubts and fears. The only certainty: Deep Blue had no such worries.

I fought back to win the first match, but the writing was on the wall. Eventually, I lost to the machine, but unlike John Henry, I survived. The chess world still wanted a human champion. Even today, free chess apps stronger than Deep Blue exist, yet people play more than ever. Predictions of obsolescence were wrong. I learned we must face fears to get the most from technology and our humanity.

Inspired by my battles, I asked: what if humans played with computers? Human intuition + machine calculation. Human strategy, machine tactics. Human experience, machine memory. Could this be perfect chess? In 1998, Advanced Chess emerged, a human-plus-machine competition. Initial experiments failed. Advanced Chess found its home online. In 2005, freestyle chess revealed a truth: winners were not grandmasters or supercomputers, but amateur players managing three ordinary PCs. Coaching machines effectively outweighed raw chess knowledge and computational power.

This revealed: weak human + machine + better process > powerful machine alone, and > strong human + machine with inferior process. Better interfaces are needed to guide machines toward useful intelligence. Human + machine is not the future; it's the present. Online translation is corrected by humans, and the machine learns. In medical diagnosis and security analysis, machines calculate probabilities 80-90%, humans complete the analysis. Human part remains essential.

One year after my second Deep Blue match, headlines like "The Brain's Last Stand" became common as intelligent machines enter all sectors. Unlike farm labor, now machines replace college-educated workers and political actors. Having fought and lost, I say this is great news. Every profession will feel this pressure; otherwise, humanity stops progressing. We must speed up. Technology removes difficulties and uncertainties; we must pursue greater challenges. Machines have instructions, we have purpose. Machines have objectivity, we have passion. Focus not on current machine capabilities, but on what they cannot yet do. With intelligent machines, grand dreams become reality. Failure comes not from machine intelligence, but from our complacency and limited ambitions. Humanity is defined not by skills like hammer-swinging or chess-playing. One human-only power: to dream. So, dream big. Thank you.