The staging is not futuristic. In the center of the stage there is a black column, like a narrow television set up. That’s Project Debater. It has a prototype name and no pretension to humanity: it barely shows a discreet oval light when it speaks. It has a mechanical female voice, like Alexa or Siri, but it’s much more than a home speaker. Project Debater reasons, understands arguments and even jokes. His intellectual agility demonstrates the extent to which artificial intelligence has advanced , but also the slowness of the progress: for now his themes are limited, his exposition may waver and the format of his interventions is fixed.
“I can not experience poverty directly and I have no complaints about my own standards of living,” says Project Debater shortly after beginning his first intervention. The audience laughs without much conviction, as if wondering if that machine had made an acceptable joke.
After its public presentation in June 2018, Project Debater faced its biggest challenge on Monday in the framework of IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. Before her, a formidable rival, Harish Natarajan, graduated from Oxford and Cambridge and with more victories in the world in debate championships. The format was common for a competition of the genre: two rounds of 4 minutes and another final of 2 minutes to conclude.
The occasion recalled other definitive battles between machines and humans, such as chess, go or Starcraft. “Today we can make history,” said the moderator, if a robot passed another milestone. Although a debate is different. The victory is awarded by a jury with a subjective criterion, not a result on a board.The subject to be discussed was: “The State must subsidize pre-school education”. Project Debater defended the proposal, Natarajan rebutted it.
In the end, Natarajan won. The victory was for those who changed the opinion of more people in the audience. Natarajan had in favor that few people believed that the State should not subsidize the education of the smallest. So convincing a few attendees was enough.
languages (40 million) are comparable. The challenge of confronting Debater is like playing Trivia against the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia and the New York Times archivetogether.
The distinction in knowledge was overwhelming. Project Debater was taken out of the system studies of the University of Melbourne or Duke on children without studies and delinquency, cited Australian or British prime ministers word for word. Given this fact, Natarajan balanced with arguments expressed in a more floral way. But no evidence, no proper quotation, just more rhetoric: Debater never exceeded the allotted time, Natarajan always.
This does not mean that the arguments of Proyecto Debater did not have finesse. In his huge memory there are also refined articles: “My intention is not to leave a suitcase full of money for anyone who wants it,” he said, to defend that he did not want to give away public money.
He is not aware
Project Debater is not aware. He is programmed to look for the best arguments for his thesis. The jokes, for example, are in a “bag” of ironies that give robot personality: “Their challenge is to take them out at the right time,” says Noam Slonim, director of the Debater Project in Haifa (Israel), where it develops. It is not easy to define the right moment or an argument in favor. Hence part of the fascination. Its merit is not only to reason but to listen to its rival, to understand the core of its arguments and to refute it. “For starters, sometimes I listen to my opponents and I wonder if they want to, if they prefer people at their doors asking for money, that there are people without food and drinking water.” Giving opportunities to the less fortunate should be a moral obligation of any human ”
There was the machine using “moral” and humanity arguments against a human, which in contrast seemed cruel. Again, the robot does not understand why it is moral, it only knows that it is effective. Its creators, who have been working with Project Debater for more than 6 years, are surprised when they hear some subtle argument, which comes from something that could be called “knowledge”. His artificial intelligence is “wider,” says Slonim.
The technological marvel must not forget a key detail: it improvises only in a prepared and favorable terrain. The researchers behind the project offer a list of topics to discuss. The communication department of IBM chooses one that is current and little thorny: abortion, for example, no. Project Debater defends him or attacks him with a rival, but could not face an interview where the questions are addressed. You need a thesis to support or refute. At least, at the moment.
Languages are another problem. Debater understands and speaks in English. Preparing a Debater in another language is not automatic. The corpus of knowledge -the academic journals- is not the same as in English.
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