A Human Beat A.I. in a Debate Tournament, and Robot Takeover Has Been Held Off Another Day

I can't wait to tell my future children about the day robots were about to take over--before one brave man held them at bay. It's an unlikely story, as all the best ones are. Harish Natarajan, just a guy in a vest, beat IBM's computer with wit and verve in a debate tournament this week, Bloomberg reports. Granted, he was the 2012 European debate-tournament winner, and is the record holder for most debate-competition wins overall. Champion of the robots was a human-size black box that IBM has lovingly nicknamed "Miss Debater," which can "[scan] more than 300 million newspaper articles and scientific journals to identify relevant arguments on any given topic." The arena was IBM's Think conference in San Francisco.