Shastraarth (Debate on Vedas and Puranas) was known to be the most intellectual pursuit of the society in ancient India. After rigorous debates, the winner was appointed as advisor to the King on various matters. 

Trying to fulfil our curiosity about the universe whilst trying to make sense of it with our five senses and assembling arguments to justify our understanding is part of the foundational instincts of humans. Perfecting your arguments which are more plausible and coherent than those of others can be a game changer in today’s hyperactive world with social media. For politicians, ideas and theories which can beat the arguments of the adversaries can be the basis of winning elections. For CEOs and leaders, rational reasoning can be the most essential part of forming strong strategies to present their ideas to their clients and employees. Not only them, for executives making critical decisions, for donors making huge donations and even for NGOs working on various causes – evaluating their strategy and understanding the potential narratives that can be created (and counter arguments) is a huge part of decision making. Afterall, you can win hearts with the right discourse.

Now imagine: if there is a machine which does this complicated, sophisticated and calculated task of finding the right argument for you. Project Debater by IBM does just that. It is currently the most sophisticated system that takes advantage of Natural Language Processing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence and touches the limits of language understanding, generation, and rebuttal. 

After a full decade of hard work, Project Debater team based out of Israel came out for a public demonstration of their system. Making such an AI system for debating is of higher order of complexity then making AI systems for winning games. The inputs for such an AI system can be millions of online videos on different topics, News archives, Documentaries, Movies, Conversational data, etc. This ability to make decisions, which are not only objective but also subjective – is what makes it unique in the history of science and technology. The winner of the debate must be judged by the public, that does not come into structured or rule-based AI gaming systems. Debater system has learnt to construct its arguments based on the training it has received from the Corpus based arguments, Principal arguments and Rebuttal based arguments. With the availability of GPUs and super computers, the computational power requirements required for such systems has taken a backstage. With the coming of RNNs and transformers, the capabilities of AI in understanding, generating, and modelling of language constructs has taken a big leap. This is the first such system which can understand the polarity, strength and relevance of different human arguments made in free flow style and can come up with its own counter. 

Many philosophers, spiritual masters and counsellors will wait for such system to democratize to use it for making more meaningful, impactful and error-free arguments which can sway their followers and clients. So, be ready, when an AI machine can be your spiritual master, Life Guide, Career Counsellor and stress buster with readymade arguments to lift your mood, motivation and purpose in life. 

This article first appeared in the TOI