Should we fear the robots?

Just over two years ago, Microsoft released a chatbot on Twitter named Tay. Created to mimic the speech and spelling of a 19-year-old American girl, the program was designed to interact with other Twitter users and get smarter as it discovered more about the world through their posts--a process called machine learning. Rather than becoming an after-school chum for bored teens, though, Tay was soon tweeting everything from "I'm smoking kush in front of the police" to "I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." She was shut down 16 hours after her launch. Tay's rants--which featured racist slurs and Holocaust denials--tapped into people's biggest anxieties about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). With no moral compass to guide them, the fear goes, machines will be unable to follow the same social rules as humans.