#50: To Persuade is Human?

In 2019, IBM introduced the world to Project Debater: an AI system that could go up against humans to debate anything. In this episode, we trace Project Debater’s growth from just an idea to a fully fledged piece of technology and the public debates it’s engaged in. And it raises a bigger question: is persuasion a fundamentally human ability or is it really something that machines are capable of? We hear from IBM engineer and project leaders Noam Slonim, expert debaters Harish Natarajan, Dan ...