On June 22nd, Munk Debates will be hosting a debate between Max Tegmark and Yann LeCun on the following subject:

Be it resolved, AI research and development poses an existential threat.

Max is taking the "Pro" side and Yann is taking the "Con" side.

Artificial Intelligence | Munk Debates

Munk Debate on Artificial Intelligence

Munk Debates does a poll of the audience before and after each debate. The debaters are then judged based on how many people in the audience (on net) changed their minds from "Pro" to "Con" or vice-versa. You can see some examples from their previous debates on their debates page.

This market resolves to the numerical value representing the change in audience opinion, as a percentage vote gain, for the "Pro" side. In other words: final "Pro" vote percentage minus initial "Pro" vote percentage. A shift in favour of the "Con" side will be represented as a negative number.

For example:

• If the initial poll shows 50% Pro/50% Con, and the final poll shows 70% Pro/30% Con, then this market resolves to "20".

• If the initial poll shows 80% Pro/20% Con, and the final poll shows 40% Pro/60% Con, this market resolves to "-40".

This market will close at the currently-scheduled end of the debate (8:45 PM Eastern time), in case folks want to evaluate the arguments live and predict how they might sway the audience. This may mean that the results could be announced before this market fully closes, but I think that's an okay tradeoff.

This market will resolve sometime after the final results are announced, possibly with a delay to allow me the time to look up the results and resolve it. (I may not be able to watch it live.)