Debating, held in high regard since the time of the Ancient Greeks (and even before that), has a new participant. It’s not quite as eloquent and sharp as the likes of Socrates or Cicero, but it can hold its own against some debaters hinting at a future where AI can understand and formulate complex arguments with ease.
An autonomous debating system
In 2019, an unusual debate was held in San Francisco. The topic of the debate was “We should subsidize preschool”, and it featured Harish Natarajan, a 2016 World Debating Championships Grand Finalist and 2012 European Debate Champion. His opponent was Project Debater, an autonomous debating system.
Quantum computers, like this IBM model, look like science fiction come to life. (Credit: Graham Carlow for IBM)
The massive intersection of Janes Avenue and East Boughton Road in Bolingbrook, Illinois, looks like many other crossroads in suburban America. A drive-through Starbucks keeps watch over 15 lanes of turning and merging mid-size SUVs, most headed for the sprawling parking lots of the Promenade shopping mall to the south, a few others en route to the shooting gallery and gun shop across Interstate 355 to the east.
Few of the people in the SUVs realize they’re driving over part of America’s blossoming research into quantum information technology. Beneath the interstate, entangled photons quantum particles moving at the speed of light are teleporting to and from the Argonne National Laboratory in the next town over, through repurposed fiber-optic cables that make up one of the longest land-based quantum networks in the nation.