Recently, a supercomputer proved powerful enough to hold its own in live debates with humans. This is a milestone and opens the door to artificial intelligence (AI) taking decision making roles. This interesting information came to us from Study Find in their article, “Supercomputer displays amazing abilities of AI in live competition against champion debaters.”
It will also will raise concerns about the rise of machines.
This new device is named Project Debater and can discuss about 100 topics. To prepare, it scans through an archive of 400 million newspaper articles and Wikipedia pages to form opening statements and counter-arguments.
In a series of outings, Project Debater took on three of the world’s best debaters without any knowledge of the topics beforehand. Afterwards, the human audiences decided it gave “a decent performance” and found to be better in terms of the amount of information it conveyed.
That decision making element is what makes many flashback to when HAL goes mad, declaring: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
