This week we meet project debater through the people who created and debated her. A computer programme that can not only pull information about some topic, but also somehow turn that into persuasive arguments. Is persuasion still fundamentally human? Or is what project debater is doing just as much persuasion as anything else you or i could do? We'll take a look at project debater's struggles in the early days, how it tried to crack the code of debates, and what happened when it went head to against human debaters in public events. Then we'll explore what nero science tells us about whether persuasion is fundamentally human, or whether it's something a machine is truly capable of dance.
This episode, featuring Andy Luttrell of the Opinion Science Podcast, is all about a machine, built by IBM, that can debate human beings on any issue, which leads to the question: is persuasion, with language, using arguments, and the ability to alter another person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, opinions, and behavior a uniquely human phenomenon, or could you be persuaded to change your mind by an artificial intelligence designed to do just that? If so, what does that say about opinions, our arguments, and in the end, our minds?
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