Then, when we ask what views they might be willing to revise, we are not hypocrites. Convincing other people to think again isn't just about making a good argument, it's about establishing that we have the right motives in doing so. When we concede that someone else has made a good point, we signal that we are not preachers, prosecutors or politicians trying to advance an agenda. We are scientists trying to get to the truth. Arguments are often far more combative and adversarial than they need to be, Harish told me. You should be willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give them a lot of credit for it. It makes you sound like a reasonable person who is taking everything into account. Being reasonable literally means that we can be reasoned with, that we are open to evolving our views in light of logic and data. So in the debate with Harish, why did Deborah neglect to do that, why did she overlook common ground? It's not because Deborah is 8 years old. It's because she isn't human. Deborah Joe precept is an anagram I invented. Her official name is Project Debater and she's a machine. Most specifically an artificial intelligence developed by IBM to do for debate what Watson did for chess. They first dreamed the idea up in 2011 and started working intensively on it in 2014. Just a few years later, Project Debater had developed the remarkable ability to conduct an intelligent debate in public, complete with facts, coherent sentences and even counter arguments. Her knowledge corpus consists of 400 million articles, largely from credible newspapers and magazines and her claim detection engine is designed to locate key arguments, identify their boundaries and weigh the evidence. For any debate topic, she can instantaneously search her knowledge graph for relevant data points, mold them into a logical case and deliver it clearly even entertainingly in a female voice within the time constraints. Her first words in the preschool subsidy debate were Greetings Harish. I've heard you hold the world record in debate competition wins against humans, but I suspect you've never debated a machine. Welcome to the future, of course, it's possible that Harish won because the audience was biased against the computer and rooting for the human. It's worth noting, though, that Harish's approach in that debate is the same one that he's used to defeat countless humans on international stages. What amazes me is that the computer was able to master multiple complex capabilities while completely missing the crucial one.