The media is full of reports about Facebook’s recent artificial intelligence experiments that resulted in machines creating their own language that humans couldn’t understand. It’s been further reported that Facebook pulled the experiment out of fear that they had created something they couldn’t control.
While the story is not completely fake news, it has been distorted and misreported. It is true that the bots created their own “language,” but it wasn’t to hide from their human overlords but simply to be more efficient. And one of the reasons the experiment was halted was because its purpose wasn’t to prove what researchers already knew about the ability of machines to generate language, but because they specifically wanted the machines to be able to talk with humans. … MORE …