[On June 19, IBM] announced that it had brought us one step closer to “real AI” (an intelligence as smart as a human) with its snappily named Project Debater: a supercomputer dedicated to the art of competitive debating. After years of research, this week it finally competed against two real-life human debaters.
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Set aside for the moment the following facts: that Project Debater is called Project Debater, that it manifests as a black monolith emitting the gentle, affectless tones of a child-killing psychopath, and that its “thinking face” is an animated set of gently bouncing blue balls. Ignore these, and you are left with a machine that can argue with a real human in real time.
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The irony of the route they have mapped for themselves is that if IBM does one day succeed in creating an intelligent machine, conscious of its own consciousness, capable of moving through the world and engaging its fellow sentient entities in conversation, it will most likely be a machine that no one will want to talk to.
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In terms of the much-feared Singularity, we will just have to hope that Project Unloveable, or whatever the researchers christen it, reaches the conclusion that taking over the world would not be enough to make people want to be its friend, and starts learning how to be a real person.
Read full, original post: Who’d want to be friends with a robot?
