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New IBM Robot Holds Its Own In a Debate With a Human (nbcnews.com)
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report: The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast, it can now hold a substantive debate with a human, according to audience feedback. IBM's Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion and in a second debate, Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The AI is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, technology that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research. An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience's knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.
The AI isn't trained on topics -- it's trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery. IBM's engineers know the AI isn't perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. "Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow," Krishna said in a blog post. "In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is -- not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game."
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research. An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience's knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.
The AI isn't trained on topics -- it's trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery. IBM's engineers know the AI isn't perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. "Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow," Krishna said in a blog post. "In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is -- not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game."
This is a cool project, but the article is utterly useless without a transcript.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
One could plausibly make the same assertion about humans. There is nothing magic about the brain, after all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Politicians hate facts
I disagree. Politicians and journalists (I used to work as the latter) love facts. Facts are a dime a dozen. Studies churn out all kinds of facts all the time, and they can be thrown together and framed for any angle you wish to argue.
There is no "AI" on this planet and this thing is just a collection of dumb reflexes that give the appearance of an intelligent agent.
And so are you.
Of course, you can argue otherwise, but then the AI can make such an argument as well, and will likely do a better job at it (according to the article).
So how should I determine which stream of electronic communication was generated by "an intelligent agent" and which one by "a collection of dumb reflexes"?
The most logical conclusion is that there's not much of a difference.
Really? Go ahead and give me an argument about something you've never heard of. I'll even let you pick the topic.
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna
If the data it uses to "argue" comes from human sources, it has a human bias.
That being said, it is cool technology and it demonstrates how bad human debate can be. If you can win an argument without actually knowing what you are talking about (which you can), it demonstrates the (lack of) value debate can have; it also underscores the lack of real value in the level of political discourse that we have today. We spend a lot of time arguing over things we don't really know about.
Not a rhetorical question. Like all the pseudo-intelligent software being trotted out the last several years, it does not know how to 'think'. Try asking it "What are you doing right now, and why are you doing it?" and let's see what it says. All this software is doing is sifting and sorting information, and arranging it into statements, and it doesn't matter if the statements it's making are in response to statements made by the human debater, the machine does not understand what it's doing, just like it doesn't understand anything at all; there's no mind in there, it doesn't 'think', it just processes information, and it's not relevant so far as I'm concerned that it happens to do that in a sophisticated and remarkable way. Not impressed, it's just another dog-and-pony-show to placate investors and stockholders.
... or elect them to be the most powerful person in the world.
Actually, I would love to see a debate between this robot and Trump to see how it handles made-up facts, illogical assertions etc. Somehow logic and reason does not seem to work with him and he goes after emotion and feelings. Since I suspect that logic and facts are the only tools available to the program I suspect it will lose horribly - but regardless would still be an interesting debate to see.
It is a sad state that we equate Debate skills with leadership skills.
Debates are something you need to win or loose. Not an open discussion to grow and learn. You can win a debate on a false idea or lie over someone who has the truth and data on their side, however they may lack the debate skills to try to convince a neutral party. Often the best and well thoughout idea is far more complex then what can be stated in quick sound blurbs.
Presidential debates over the past few generations have not been really productive. Most of us are already had made up their mind on who they are voting for, most will just vote for whoever has a R or D on their party affiliation regardless of their stance. So the Debators neutral party is just a tiny fraction of the population. And for the most part they are trying to read non-verbal queues. (such as Nixon sweating) or finding someone just loosing their temper. The topic up for debate are not relevant as we have a good idea where the stance is.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Guys, this is really silly. As Godel has already demonstrated, it is impossible for a machine to meet the criteria of consciousness. "Artificial intelligence" is a chimerical idea and is not possible.
"Imitative intelligence" would be more accurate. A machine may be able to hold a facade of "intelligence," but any semblance of intelligence has been derived from its creators.
The claim that the machine "synthesized an argument" is misleading. Machines are not capable of a priori. The machine simply sorted information giving the appearance of a synthesized argument. The author projected this activity of synthesizing an argument onto the machine, but that is not what happened.
Then the author of the article made the incredible claim that the machine does not have bias, but just the same, they fed it a junk-food diet of newspaper articles & mental garbage.
This article is propaganda.
They're trying to persuade you to believe that machines can be intelligent, that machines will soon be just as or more capable than men at thinking, and that human mental faculties are mechanical. Perhaps the hope is that the general populace will eventually fall under of a large "appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam" umbrella and give up critical thinking altogether. This is already happening to people in STEM, who have largely ignored philosophy, and evidently cannot think rightly.