[Software] The Limits of Political Debate

[King_of_dark]

February, 2011, an Israeli computer scientist named Noam Slonim proposed building a machine that would be better than people at something that seems inextricably human: arguing about politics. Slonim, who had done his doctoral work on machine learning, works at an I.B.M. Research facility in Tel Aviv, and he had watched with pride a few days before as the company’s natural-language-processing machine, Watson, won “Jeopardy!” Afterward, I.B.M. sent an e-mail to thousands of researchers across its global network of labs, soliciting ideas for a “grand challenge” to follow the “Jeopardy!” project. It occurred to Slonim that they might try to build a machine that could defeat a champion debater. He made a single-slide presentation, and then a somewhat more elaborate one, and then a more elaborate one still, and, after many rounds competing against many other I.B.M. researchers, Slonim won the chance to build his machine, which he called Project Debater. Recently, Slonim told me that his only wish was that, when it was time for the actual debate, Project Debater be given the voice of Scarlett Johansson. Instead, it was given a recognizably robotic voice, less flexible and punctuated than Siri’s. A basic principle of robotics is that the machine shouldn’t ever trick human beings into thinking that they are interacting with any person at all, let alone one whom Esquire has twice named the “Sexiest Woman Alive.” Scientific work inside the biggest corporations can sometimes feel as insulated and speculative as in an academic lab. It wasn’t hard to imagine that businesses might make use of Slonim’s programming—that is, they might substitute a very persuasive machine for any human who interacts with people. However, Slonim’s Tel Aviv-based team was not supposed to think about any of that—they were only supposed to win a debate. To Slonim, that was a lot to ask. I.B.M. had built computers that had beaten human champions at chess, and then at trivia, and this had left the impression that A.I. was close to “humanlike intelligence,” Slonim told me. He considered that “a misleading conception.” Slonim is trim and pale, with a shaved head and glasses, and in place of the usual boosterism about artificial intelligence he has a slight sheepishness about how new the technology is. To him, the debate project was a half-step out into reality. Debate is a game, like trivia or chess, in that it has specific rules and structures, which can be codified and taught to a machine. But it is also like real life, in that the goal is to persuade a human audience to change their minds—and to do that the machine needed to know someth