At least one developer has found a way to answer his would-be debaters without having to engage in a tiring, dead-end debate himself.
When it comes to climate change, many people find themselves at odds with certain facts to the point of disputing the validity of said facts.
The developer in question (that would be Australian systems architect and entrepreneur Nigel Leck) got tired of arguing on Twitter with people who believe climate change is not occurring, so he built a bot that scrapes Twitter for certain strings of words and then responds to the author of the offending tweet with a pre-packaged link containing a science-based counter-argument.
The dialog (or should we say rhetoric?) between climate change skeptics and those in the opposite camp is apparently so formulaic that Leck's bot can carry on an exchange with a real human for dozens of tweets. He hopes to make the auto-debate even more realistic and accurate in the future by parsing data from other climate change debaters on Twitter.
One thing the bot can't do, however, is detect irony. If, for example, I sarcastically tweeted something like, "With weather like this, there's no way global warming can be real," the bot would respond as if I truly thought climate change was an unlikely theory. However, the bot does whitelist people when they respond that they don't disagree with the bot's science-based point of view.
Named "Turing Test" (after computer scientist Alan Turing's famous criteria for machine intelligence), the bot can be found on Twitter at @AI_AGW.
If you could build a bot to conduct debates on your behalf -- be those arguments religious, social, political, culinary, what have you -- what issue would you choose as the most tiresome subject worthy of auto-debate?