If we look at the technology around us, we are living in the future. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a reality we have started to live with. Taking this power of AI a step further, IBM’s AI system recently participated in an actual live public debate with humans. Yes, you heard it right. At an event held by IBM in Watson West site, San Francisco, on June 18, IBM’s AI system 'Project Debater' actually participated in a logical debate with a human being. Both, the human being and the machine, began by preparing arguments for and against the statement “We should subsidize space exploration”. Both of them spoke for 10 minutes, each while in the debate. Arvind Krishna, Director, IBM Research, wrote in a blog published on the June 18, “Just think about that for a moment. An AI-system engaged with an expert human debater, listened to her arguments, and responded convincingly with its own, unscripted reasoning to persuade an audience to consider its position on a controversial topic”. Not just once but 'Project Debater' once again debated with another Israeli expert debater, Dan Zafrir, featuring opposing arguments on the statement: “We should increase the use of telemedicine”. 'Project Debater' does not completely work on keywords and search related documents. AI is capable of finding a deeper understanding and can actually develop a perspective on the subject. However, 'Project Debater' is a machine and is impartial, and is not out to prove a position or to be right. The AI has learned hints of languages and through that it decides where the argument of the given subject is leaning towards. According to a report by Livemint, Project Debater has been in development with IBM since 2012. The two successful live debates with humans for an AI is a huge breakthrough, not only for the company but also for machines and humankind.<doc-sep>Stephen Shankland/CNET We saw computers beat humans at chess in 1997, beat humans at Jeopardy in 2011 and vanquish the world's best human players of the ancient game of Go in 2017. On Monday, a computer edged out a victory over people in a far more nuanced competition: debate. Now playing: Watch this: IBM's new AI can debate you IBM created a system called Project Debater that competes in what the company calls computational argumentation -- knowing a subject, presenting a position and defending it against opposition. At a press event, IBM pitted the system against two humans with a track record of winning debates. In one debate, Noa Ovadia overall nudged two people among a few dozen in a human audience toward her perspective that governments shouldn't subsidize space exploration. But in the second, Project Debater soundly defeated Dan Zafrir, pulling nine audience members toward its stance that we should increase the use of telemedicine. You're not going to lose your job yet to Project Debater's commercial spin-off right away as Big Blue tries to profit from the IBM Research project. Project Debater betrayed its inhuman nature several times over the course of its 20 minutes of off-the-cuff speech. But Debater did demonstrate that artificial intelligence can handle some complexities of human interaction, not just the clear-cut rules and victories of a board game or game show. "Our life is not black or white. It's ambiguous, it's subjective," said Ranit Aharonov, director of Project Debater. "AI will have to navigate in that territory." IBM Research Project Debater was trained in advance on debating methods, but not the details of the debate itself, which it found out about only moments before the debate started. To formulate its argument, it had at its disposal a collection of 300 million news articles and scholarly papers, previously indexed for quick search results. But it had to find the information, package it persuasively, listen to its opponents' arguments and formulate a rebuttal. "It's amazing to see this technology pull from 300 million sources and distill it into what sounds like a conversational narrative in debate," said Clea Conner Chang, chief operating officer of Intelligence Squared Debates, an organization that runs its own debates with a similar argue-and-respond style. Echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey Project Debater's brain is a group of computers in a distant data center, but IBM chose to represent it as a black pillar on the stage. Sci-fi fans might have been reminded of the alien obelisk in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the book and movie that also made famous HAL 9000, a well-spoken but malevolent AI. Debater paid homage to the author, too, at one point quoting his famous maxim, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Now playing: Watch this: IBM creates AI to destroy humans... in debate Although IBM didn't try to pretend Debater is human, it speaks in a well-modulated female voice, and researchers call it "she." At the top of the pillar was a display showing its state of mind with curvaceous shapes in a soothing blue. Three circles swapped places when Project Debater was thinking. They merged into an oval with a waving sinusoidal line when the machine was speaking. And when it was listening to its human opponent, the three circles hopped up and down like the animations you see when your computer is waiting for a software update to install. Debater showed a grasp of debating's nuts and bolts. It marshaled evidence, told you its stance, explained how its argument would proceed and made its case. It quoted authorities, like German ministers touting the economic benefits of space exploration or scientific studies showing better health outcomes for diabetes patients monitored from afar. Plenty of its words were lifted directly from its corpora of data, IBM said. But it does construct its own sentences, too, as when presenting its summary of the arguments it plans to make. And it does plenty of other language work, too -- assessing arguments, deciding which points to raise specifically or broadly, and evaluating the counterarguments made by its opponent. Project Debater, run out of IBM's labs in Haifa, Israel, began in 2011 when IBM was looking for the next challenge after its Jeopardy victory. Researcher Noam Slonim suggested a human versus computer debate, and Aya Soffer, who runs IBM Research's global AI team, liked it as well. It was one among 30 projects IBM evaluated, she said. "From our perspective, the debate format is the means and not the end. It's a way to push the technology forward and part of our bigger strategy of mastering language," Soffer said. "In general, computers are lagging significantly in understanding and being able to express themselves. If we expect AI to be useful, being able to communicate with people is critical." IBM Research Comic relief It throws in jokes, too -- human-written jokes, but the machine has to master the timing. "I can't say it makes my blood boil, because I have no blood, but it seems some people naturally suspect technology because it's new," Debater said in its closing argument in favor of telemedicine. And arguing for space exploration subsidies, Debater said it supports technology, "being as I am a prime example of its power." The audience chuckled, though an audience outside IBM's Watson West offices in San Francisco might react differently to a computer that can figure out the right moment to inject that comment into a discussion. There were gaffes, like the moment Debater said subsidizing space exploration "is more important than good roads, improved schools or better health care." That statement would torpedo most would-be politicians' chances at election. Debate 'defines what it is to be human' But Chris Reed, a professor at the University of Dundee, said we shouldn't take the achievements for granted. He was impressed that Debater successfully figured out what raw material supported the argument it was making and that it got verb tenses correct and mastered other basics that have tripped up computer debaters. Debater even demonstrated procatalepsis -- the ability to anticipate its opponents' arguments and pre-emptively attack them, Reed said.<doc-sep>When Ms Ovadia argued money should be spent on more pressing needs than space travel, the machine offered this reply: “It is very easy to say that there are more important things to spend money on, and I do not dispute this. No one is claiming that this is the only item on our expense list. But that is beside the point.<doc-sep>advertisement advertisement “Hello, Noa. We meet again. And for the first time in front of a non-IBM audience. I’ve been told it helps to take a deep breath. But unfortunately, I cannot do that.” advertisement advertisement The setting is a competitive debate being held at Watson West, IBM’s AI outpost in San Francisco’s tech-centric SOMA neighborhood. Noa is Noa Ovadia, a champion debater from Israel. The speaker greeting her is her opponent—whose inability to breathe deeply makes perfect sense given that it’s a piece of software, generating Siri-like female speech that emanates from a human-sized black column with a screen on its front. This is indeed the first time that the software in question, Project Debater, has shown its stuff outside of secret trial runs. Since 2012, IBM Research has been teaching it to debate humans on a vast array of subjects—making it a successor to Deep Blue (which beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match in 1997) and Watson (which won a Jeopardy tournament against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011). On Monday afternoon in San Francisco, Project Debater argued in favor of government subsidies for space exploration while Ovadia made the case against them. The software then took on another Israeli debater, Dan Zafrir, on the topic of increased investment in telemedicine. (Project Debater was for it; Zafrir was against.) Throughout, it was obvious that Project Debater is a work in progress. But the AI scored some points, appeared to understand the gist of its opponents’ arguments well enough to respond to them, and made the audience laugh—sometimes even on purpose. Based on voting from the few dozen spectators, it narrowly lost the space exploration debate but swayed more audience members to its position on telemedicine than Zafrir did. advertisement That was good enough to make the exhibition a success in the eyes of Noam Slonim, a senior technical staff member at IBM’s research center in Haifa, Israel and the person who originally proposed the Project Debater idea in 2011. The effort now includes dozens of researchers at multiple IBM labs and is led by Slonim’s Haifa colleague Ranit Aharonov. Merely seeing the software keep the audience engaged over a 20-minute debate “was a very positive feeling,” he tells me at a post-debate reception. Witnessing a computer thrash the Kasparovs and Jenningses of competitive debating at their own craft would be an epoch-shifting moment, but “our goal is not to develop yet another system that is better than humans in doing something,” stresses Aharonov. Instead, IBM wants to create debating software that can spar with “a reasonably competent human, but not necessarily a world champion, and come across holding its own,” says IBM director of research Arvind Krishna. Still, even if the company is keeping its aspirations in check, its latest adventure in AI involves challenges unlike any it’s tackled before. The next grand challenge Soon after Watson bested Jennings and Rutter in a tournament taped at IBM’s Yorktown, N.Y. research center in January 2011, the company began to think about how to top that memorable feat of artificial intelligence. “All of the thousands of researchers … got the same email asking what should be the next AI grand challenge that IBM Research should pursue,” remembers Slonim. The goal, he explains, was to come up with a project that was “scientifically interesting and challenging and would have some business value. Something big, something that would make a difference.” advertisement Slonim brainstormed with colleagues and hatched the concept of IBM Research training AI to debate a human being. Israel—a country with a strong culture of competitive debating—was a logical place for this particular dream to originate. “They certainly have a very firmly held belief, both in society and their political system, about free debate in all forms,” says Krishna. It took about a year before Slonim’s proposal, in more fully evolved form, won out over other grand-challenge possibilities. But in 2012, the company officially decided to pursue it. As more researchers were devoted to the project, they made headway; by 2016, they had a rough draft of the technology that worked well enough to make clear the idea wasn’t a pipe dream. “But not in a way you’d be willing to watch,” says Krishna. “You’d get a topic, then it would come back a few hours later and spit out a one-minute speech.” Even today, with Project Debater capable of performing before an audience, gauging its success isn’t that straightforward a matter. Winning a game of chess or Jeopardy is a well-defined goal, and there can be no doubt when you’ve achieved it. Whether someone (or something) has won a debate, however, is entirely subjective and up to every spectator to decide for himself or herself. (In case you hadn’t noticed, even reasonable people tend not to agree on who won high-profile debates such as those associated with political campaigns.) advertisement No debater can convince an audience without sounding well informed about the subject at hand. IBM has given Project Debater a huge corpus of information, feeding it billions of sentences drawn from sources such as hundreds of millions of newspaper articles. The AI is able to identify facts and opinions and weave them together, in a sort of sweeping automated cribbing which its human opponents can’t match. The resulting arguments, read aloud by IBM’s text-to-speech engine during a debate, are far from seamless. In San Francisco, the software sometimes made assertions—such as telemedicine being a boon to working mothers—and then abruptly shifted gears without explaining what it had meant. It also peppered its advocacy for subsidized space exploration with a surprisingly large number of references to the Middle East, a quirk that Slonim told me might simply relate to its corpus of knowledge skewing toward sources from that region. But Project Debater’s argumentative patchwork holds together better than you might expect, and it stitches it together rapidly. Though not in absolute real time: After each of its opponents’ statements, the AI took a couple of minutes to mull over its response.<doc-sep>
SAN FRANCISCO — The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast that it can now hold a substantive debate with a human. 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 against Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The new AI system is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, the program 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. The skinny, black, rectangular screen stands about five and a half feet tall, putting it around the same height as a human opponent. “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. This comes from Project Debater’s ability to “dive into a lot of data very quickly and gather information and numbers we don’t have access to quickly,” said Ranit Aharonov, manager of the Project Debater team in Haifa, Israel. Project Debater looks for sentences and clauses in journals that are relevant to the topic and determines what the potential clashes could be around the topic, according to Aharonov. It then listens and thinks — an act illustrated by three dancing circles on its screen — before it prepares to deliver its counterpoints. 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. When arguing in support of telemedicine, Project Debater said: “I can’t say it makes my blood boil because I have no blood,” and then launched into a passionate defense of technological advances. Project Debater has some human-taught jokes in its network, but “the system has to understand the right time to use which joke,” Aharonov said. “And it doesn’t always get it right, which is a joke for us.” Both debates followed the same format. The audience voted on their stance before and after the debate, so IBM could measure how Project Debater fared against its human opponents. After Project Debater was assigned its topic and stance, it launched into a four-minute opening speech. It then listened and processed its opponent’s opening remarks, taking two minutes to think before it delivered its rebuttal. Both sides then delivered closing remarks to summarize their positions before the audience vote. 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.”