The Terrible Trouble with Natural Language Processing (It's Us.)

A researcher who wishes to design a machine that thinks and acts like a human runs up against the self-evident and somewhat embarrassing problem of human beings themselves. No one wants to build a system that turns out to be a jerk. Look at Microsoft: In March it launched a chatbot on Twitter called Tay that learned from interactions with people. People being unpredictable, they said terrible things to it, and Tay became a jerk in about a day. To successfully interact with humans, though, an AI has to be able to understand humans and their systems in all their complexity.