Here's What Happened When IBM's Advanced AI Machine Challenged An International Debate Champion

Aristotle broke ground by claiming that the art of persuasion—rhetoric—can be learned. Although Aristotle was right, he may never have envisioned a day when a machine could also be taught to argue. It took 2,300 years for it happen, but it happened.

On Monday, February 11, I had a front row seat for the first live debate between human and machine. For six years, scientists at IBM Research have been working on the next big milestone for artificial intelligence (AI). First, Deep Blue beat a chess champion in 1996. Watson beat a champion game-show contestant on Jeopardy in 2011. Would an AI machine beat a world record-holding debate champion in 2019?

The hundreds of invited audience members gave the win to…the human. But IBM’s “Project Debater” still made history as the first AI machine to make a persuasive argument about a given a topic it had not been programmed to learn.

Harish Natarajan holds the world record for most international debate victories. Monday’s debate was the most unusual—and perhaps the most challenging—he’s ever had. After all, Project Debater had access to 10 billion sentences in hundreds of millions of documents. Natarajan had no access to the Internet. He just had a pen, his notepad and his brain.

Each side—human and machine—had 15 minutes to prep for the debate. They were each presented with a topic: "Should we subsidize preschools." Project Debater had to argue in support of it. Natarajan had to argue against it. Once again, he had only his brain, persuasion skills and a remarkable human ability to connect with an audience.
Source: https://www.forbes.com

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