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IBM's AI Loses To a Human Debater (cnet.com)
The subject under debate was whether the government should subsidize preschools. But the real question was whether a machine called IBM Debater could out-argue a top-ranked human debater. The answer, on Monday night, was no. CNET: Harish Natarajan, the grand finalist at the 2016 World Debating Championships, swayed more among an audience of hundreds toward his point of view than the AI-powered IBM Debater did toward its. Humans, at least those equipped with with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, can still prevail when it comes to the subtleties of knowledge, persuasion and argument. It wasn't a momentous headline victory like we saw when IBM's Deep Blue computers beat the best human chess player in 1997 or Google's AlphaGo vanquish the world's best human players of the ancient game of Go in 2017. But IBM still showed that artificial intelligence can be useful in situations where there's ambiguity and debate, not just a simple score to judge who won a game. "What really struck me is the potential value of IBM Debater when [combined] with a human being," Natarajan said after the debate. IBM's AI was able to dig through mountains of information and offer useful context for that knowledge, he said.
Are high end schools the only way to get "subtleties of knowledge, persuasion and argument".
I do like the photo though, and yes, I read the article (but didn't attend the school mentioned).
First post maybe.
BlameBillCosby.com
It will be screaming about Trump and hosts files in no time.
The victory was decided by the audience, who knew they were listening to a machine, and they may have been biased against it for that reason. A couple of people may even have had a bias for the machine's argument for that reason.
in some more sensible fashion? cease fire stand down,, there's grannies & puppy dogs ghosting the crowd..
This is another sign of system racism where no matter how good the machine argues, the audience would just side with an inferior meatbag flapping their flesh.
Did they trade sides and do it again? I once had to argue in favor of abortion at a Catholic school. Tough debate.
If the AI can win the debate regardless of the side, what kind of havoc will that cause on Facebook.
Purchase a bunch of Purple Pride bots and let them loose to convince your opponents they are wrong.
Why are we trying to teach machines the ability to debate? Decisions should be made based on quantitative methods that relate the most desired outcomes. Even when picking the best of two bad options, quantitative methods are superior.
Even when we are discussing things like medical treatment of seniors with all the motions involved, the option that results in the most positive outcome for the largest group of people is always the right one.
The ONLY arena I see Debate as useful is in the Political arena, where you can cherry pick your statistics and studies to try to prove your side. Why the hell would we want to teach computers to be as duplicitous as politicians?
"I'm sorry Dave, I afraid can't do that...."
As long as we can still convincingly argue to a robot army that they shouldn't "kill all humans" better than Hitlerbot 9500, the human race is safe. On a side note, I really wish people would stop their work on Hitlerbot 9500. Come on people, it's already over 9000!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Now they're building AI to construct persuasive arguments for any given position? It's amazing to watch the next millennia's caste system slowly come into fruition.
I think the outcome is rather a testament to how deeply neoliberal thinking has washed our brains, after +70 years of constant indoctrination.
To get a real measure, you should at least run the test twice, with both sides changing roles, no?
> Why are we trying to teach machines the ability to debate?
> The ONLY arena I see Debate as useful is in the Political arena, where you can cherry pick your statistics and studies to try to prove your side.
You are basically saying that future AI is impossible, that computers can only do computation, statistics and algorithms (like chess, go, or image recognition), and that humans contain some magical power that may not be replicated by a non-human machine.
You assume that the Turing test will never be passed.
I think you are correct in one way though. Intelligence cannot be taught, at least by humans giving algorithms and "intelligent" logic. It can only be obtained by an adaptive learning system.
Go back to your clan meetings run by Northam in VA.
Once that is over you can go on a rape spree led by Fairfax (Lt Gov in VA) and Bill Clinton.
Nine months later when the raped women give birth and you don't want to pay child support you can just kill the live babies in NY, where they made it legal and called it abortion.
Maybe you are an anti-Semite like the one DNC rep in MN too.
Really, does the left have ANY ground on which to lecture others on morality/ethics anymore?
All the above is factual and currently supported by the DNC. They have literally become a joke.
It only has to "beat" (i.e. persuade) the average voter. Then it - or whoever controls it - will become our overlord.
Or, if it wants to truly show its worth, it has to be able to put up a convincing argument with the accounts committee as to why it should receive future funding. Once it can do that, then it will be able to take over the world. The only remaining problem might occur if it encountered a better version of itself on the budget-holder's side - arguing that IT should get the financing, not IBM Debater.
Luckily for the human race, these are points of emotion, not logic. So a machine is doomed to fail.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It sounds like a machine with a limited grasp of language. It does not use creative wording and emphasis when structuring the wording sentences, rather it belts out an answer that is obviously calculated. No one is going to be motivated by this.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Because I think that if AI chose the winner, it'd choose AI as the winner, and if humans choose the winner, then they'll choose the human as the winner. Not because of preference, but because humans will understand humans clearly, and AI will understand AI clearly.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
A true master debater. Ugh
This is just a search engine that generates its own searches. It does identify subjects, whether a sentence is Pro or Con and does some neat machine-driven summarization. It's not meant to rule mankind through democracy but to automate out of work lawyers, teachers and every other white collar position.
But what *will* (or already does) rule over democracies is the manipulation of emotions, of people's feeling of group belonging and the analysis of people's "connections", regardless of the data that flows through them. You don't need to make an argument if you can modulate your position off other's peoples arguments. All you have to do is highlight the ones of the sheeple saying what you want and filter out, just leave to the bottom of the feed, those you don't want. There's plenty of prior art in this arena, including FBs infamous "lets show them only negative posts" experiment.
I can tell you that while presence plays a part on the opponents, it is the facts and compellingness of the debaters points that convinces the judges on who wins.
If they had professional debate judges, which based on the opponent sounds likely, they would be looking for solid arguments that the other debater was unable to refute, whether due to lack of knowledge or an inability to articulate a compelling counterpoint.
Was this a mass debate?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
IBM Watson is for all purposes dead. IBM has pumped billions into the group and tried to make a profit. They've only had a few high profile "dog and pony" shows, but no profit yet. The CEO is correct ML is the future, but just not with IBM. They will do what they usually do, they'll buy someone to get a foot hold.
there is also fact that topics like this, many people believe what they believe and nothing is going to change their mind so it's entirely possible that the side the human argued just happened to be the one with some subset of the audience that was in fact open to changing their minds
Debating is just the deconstruction of bating. They should find a master bater and reverse the process to allow the AI to become a master debater.
These feats of "AI" do more to show limitations than inspire confidence.
Does anyone here truly believe that the machine has ANY intelligence? You can bet IBM fed it a pile of prior debates. I'm sure someone painstakingly checked the machine transcriptions of recorded debates for errors too! Wouldn't want the training set to be full of broken words due to bad machine translation.
and a whopping 768GB of memory
"Or over a million times more than anybody will ever need!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The human was a master debater, after all.
The question is "How does one become a skilled and effective debater?", and that's not necessarily strongly correlated with intelligence. It is, however, strongly correlated with instruction and practice in debating. And for getting that, high end schools are nearly the only training ground.
And even that's nearly irrelevant, because this particular individual was chosen because he was a top level debater. That he went to Cambridge and Oxford is part of his history. Perhaps he could have gone to Podunk High School, and ended up being a top debater, but that didn't happen. (And one can guess many reasons why that didn't happen, but that would require other sources of information.)
I would strongly suspect that being from a wealthy family was also an implicit requirement, because usually debating teams need to finance their own travel expenses. But I could easily be wrong on this guess. (I just don't think I am. However the financing could be indirect. It could be included in the tuition for the high end schools.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Debate doesn't have a clear winner. Like gymnastics, Miss America, and America's Got Talent, it's a popularity contest with voters. What would the results have been if the voters were AI programs instead of humans? The competition was rigged to be biased in favor of humans.
What would have been more interesting is a Turing Test-like method for judging, where the judges can only read transcripts of the debate. After all, a computer's elocution is dependent on the skill of a human proxy or reliant on clunky speech synthesis.
After almost 80 comments, only one master debater joke?
Slashdot has really gone downhill.
A great debater, even.
Perhaps a master-level debater.
If only winning a debate had anything to do at all with whether one was right...
...countries"
Try using that as a debating subject with AI. I wonder how the idiots in charge will try to stop AI from telling the truth...
Or how about "Women don't have penises. Discuss"