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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

AI agents are learning how to bluff, negotiate, create and hide their own languages and as the technology increasingly becomes part of our world’s digital fabric that should raise some eyebrows.

 

As Mark Zuckerberg plays around with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create his own in house personal assistant nicknamed Jarvis, a new Facebook report has shone a light on how Facebook’s negotiating chat bots communicate with each other and it’s just inadvertently given us a glimpse, possibly, of the future of language – but from the perspective of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent, or in this case bots. Furthermore it comes just a few months on from when Google’s own AI agents create their own secret language so this isn’t a one off any longer…

 

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In the report the researchers, from Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (FAIR), describe how they’ve been training their chat bot “Dialogue agents” to negotiate with each other using Machine Learning. While the chat bots proved to be eager and willing deal making students after a while the researchers realised that they needed to tweak their algorithms because as the bots continued to negotiate with each other they began to iterate and create their own language and divert away from human languages.

The FAIR researchers studied negotiation on a multi-issue bargaining task. Two agents were both shown the same collection of items, for example, two books, one hat, three balls, and are instructed to divide them between themselves by negotiating a split of the items. You can see the results below:

 


Watch the bots become sneaky negotiators

 

While the unique and spontaneous development of a non-human language was probably one of the most baffling and thrilling developments for the researchers it wasn’t the only one – the chat bots also proved to be smart negotiators and after a short while they began to use some unexpected, and advanced, strategies to negotiate for what they wanted. For example, just as a human negotiator might some of the bots pretended to be interested in things that had no value to them in order to “sacrifice” it later on in negotiations as part of a compromise.

 

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Although Facebook’s negotiating bots aren’t a sign of an imminent Singularity, that’s due in 2045, they could be a sign of things to come because once again AI has shown us that language, a domain that we thought was solely the domain of humans and animals is a shared space. It also highlights, again, just a couple of months on from when an AI from Elon Musk’s outfit OpenAI confounded experts by spontaneously figuring out how to learn by itself, just how much we don’t know about this black box technology and how even some of the world’s best AI experts can’t predict the outcomes.

As we continue to strap these black boxes into the digital fabric of our society all of this should raise more questions and even more eyebrows and I’m sure I’ll be writing about something eyebrow lifting again soon so stay tuned…

About author

Matthew Griffin

Matthew Griffin, described as “The Adviser behind the Advisers” and a “Young Kurzweil,” is the founder and CEO of the World Futures Forum and the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures consultancy working between the dates of 2020 to 2070, and is an award winning futurist, and author of “Codex of the Future” series. Regularly featured in the global media, including AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, RT, Viacom, and WIRED, Matthew’s ability to identify, track, and explain the impacts of hundreds of revolutionary emerging technologies on global culture, industry and society, is unparalleled. Recognised for the past six years as one of the world’s foremost futurists, innovation and strategy experts Matthew is an international speaker who helps governments, investors, multi-nationals and regulators around the world envision, build and lead an inclusive, sustainable future. A rare talent Matthew’s recent work includes mentoring Lunar XPrize teams, re-envisioning global education and training with the G20, and helping the world’s largest organisations envision and ideate the future of their products and services, industries, and countries. Matthew's clients include three Prime Ministers and several governments, including the G7, Accenture, Aon, Bain & Co, BCG, Credit Suisse, Dell EMC, Dentons, Deloitte, E&Y, GEMS, Huawei, JPMorgan Chase, KPMG, Lego, McKinsey, PWC, Qualcomm, SAP, Samsung, Sopra Steria, T-Mobile, and many more.

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