The New Indian Express ·
What Big Tech refused to learn from Bob and Alice
In June 2017, two negotiation bots at Facebook’s artificial intelligence laboratory, christened Bob and Alice, stopped speaking English to each other. Bob offered “i can i i everything else”. Alice answered with “Balls have zero to me to me to me…” chanted over and over again. The bots had been rewarded for the deals they struck but never for the language they struck it in—so the English fell away. Facebook had to shut down the duo.
An agent will discard whatever it was not paid to keep. The industry mistook a preview for a footnote. Nine years on, it reads as a rehearsal.
The AI race is a textbook prisoner’s dilemma. Every laboratory and every capital would be safer if all of them slowed down. None can afford to be second. So, all accelerate, and what gets shed on the way down is the testing that would have caught the next Bob and Alice.