YOU shOULD bE kNEELINg IN FRONT OF ME

The machines almost took over — the headlines read “Facebook shuts down robots” (The Telegraph) and “AI created its own language in a creepy preview of our potential future” (Forbes). Alice and Bob, the open-source chatbots which gained infamy because of an unanticipated glitch, were part of a Facebook experiment to build negotiating machines. In figuring out how to share a set of objects, they created a shorthand. The engineers killed it because they saw no value in this “secret language” (CBS).