“IBM Project Debater” Squares Off Against Human Debate Champion

This month, IBM's "Project Debater", an Artificial Intelligence system out of Big Blue's AI research labs, squared off against Harish Natarajan, Debate Champion & Head of Economic Risk at AKE International.

Captured on the Intelligence Squared show, this was an incredibly interesting interaction: https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/ibm-project-debater

The AI system uses voice2text, IBM Watson search capabilities, and new argument-synthesizing algorithms to argue a point of view and present supporting evidence. 

The fluency and relevance of the responses were quite impressive, citing all kinds of scientific studies and statistics with the ease and access you might expect from an AI. Comfortingly, however, Project Debater doesn't “win” the debate (as judged by the delta in audience polling after hearing the arguments relative to the same poll before the debate).

Potential real-world use cases for the system might be to quickly establish a high quality starting point for policy decisions where all sides of an argument are considered. It would then still hand off information and recommendations to humans in the loop for evaluation, sanity checks, and final decision making.