Actually, real debate is about responding to the other debaters arguments and countering them. Thus this IBM marketing show was not really a debate. This was

Actually, real debate is about responding to the other debaters arguments and countering them. Thus this IBM marketing show was not really a debate. This was a demo that IBM could synthesize a plausible argument that supports or refutes a given assertion. That's interesting and a bit impressive (presuming its argument isn't simply a regurgitation of some position paper it found online). But without understanding cause and effect, its arguments will remain very superficial, probably driven by a small catalog of argument 'frames' (templates) that adaptively fill a handful of slots like [needs] [means] [goal] [conflicts] and [emotional hooks]. Using such simple recipes it can produce verbiage that plausibly sounds humanlike, but isn't actually reasoning. It's likely that the system couldn't even diagnose help desk problems using basic logic, e.g. backtracking to thise dependencies that might have caused the given outcome, thereby identifying only the possible and plausible causes.