It was man 1, machine 1 in the first live, public debate between an artificial intelligence system developed by IBM and two human debaters.
The AI, called Project Debater, appeared on stage in a packed conference room at IBM’s San Francisco office embodied in a 6ft tall black panel with a blue, animated “mouth”. It was a looming presence alongside the human debaters Noa Ovadia and Dan Zafrir, who stood behind a podium nearby.
Although the machine stumbled at many points, the unprecedented event offered a glimpse into how computers are learning to grapple with the messy, unstructured world of human decision-making.
For each of the two short debates, participants had to prepare a four-minute opening statement, followed by a four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute summary. The opening debate topic was “we should subsidize space exploration”, followed by “we should increase the use of telemedicine”.
In both debates, the audience voted Project Debater to be worse at delivery but better in terms of the amount of information it conveyed. And despite several robotic slip-ups, the audience voted the AI to be more persuasive (in terms of changing the audience’s position) than its human opponent, Zafrir, in the second debate.
https://www.theguardian....m-debate-project-debater"There are only two emotions in the market, hope & fear. The problem is you hope when you should fear & fear when you should hope: - Jesse Livermore
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