Meet Harish Natarajan, the man who defeated IBM’s AI debater in a man-vs-machine faceoff
Harish Natarajan took on IBM’s Project Debater on pre-school subsidies. By the end of the debate, he had turned the audience to his side; most of them agreed that we should not subsidise pre-school.
After a machine beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in the past, the man-vs-machine debate seemed unavoidable. More so with artificial intelligence (AI) taking off in a big way. But man isn’t ready to fall in line with machine just yet. Champion debater Harish Natarajan, 31, showed this when he defeated IBM’s AI-backed Project Debater.
Project Debater and Harish Natarajan. Source The Hindu
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The Project Debater – affectionately dubbed “Miss Debater” – and Harish, who works as Head of Economic Risk Consulting at AKE International, were to discuss the topic “We should subsidise pre-school”. Project Debater had to speak in favour of the subject while Harish had to oppose it.
Both competitors prepared their arguments after which they took turns to make four-minute opening statements, four-minute rebuttals, and two-minute summaries, reports Techworld.
Harish Natarajan, source The Hindu
The audience voted for either side before the competition started and voted again after the debate ended.
In its opening statement, Project Debater said,
I have heard you hold the world record in debate competition wins against humans, but I suspect you have never debated a machine. Welcome to the future.”
Speaking to The Hindu, Harish said,
The first 30 seconds, of course, were strange — I realised I was up against this giant ballot box. But after that, as the AI was making arguments, I kept noting what my responses ought to be. At times, it was putting forth points that I couldn’t really deny. But I was always thinking: how do I use its words against it?”
Prior to the debate, 79 percent of the audience supported the point that pre-school should be subsidised while 13 percent didn’t. Towards the end of the debate, 62 percent agreed with a 17 percent hike, helped Harish win against Project Debater.
Speaking about his AI competitor, Harish said, "The machine was very good at doing what it was. This is somewhat unsurprising. It had 10 billion pieces of information about what was relevant. More impressive was its ability to explain that in a very straightforward and clear way.”
However, Harish believes he was able to outsmart the machine in the 25-minute rapid-fire exchange due to his focus on “emotion”.
“Emotion elevates the importance of what you’re saying. There were moments when even the machine was trying to evoke emotion. But I did have an edge because, when I talk about experiences, it comes across as more genuine partly because… well, I’m not a machine,” he told The Hindu.
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