Wild Things

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. Get ready for game bots with a mind of their own. It is the year 2002. After an explosion of R&D funded by software giants and startups, more than a third of US households are populated by sophisticated artificial intelligence bots – their decisionmaking guided by complex neural nets and simulated emotions, their perceptual systems honed to detect subtle changes in their environment. Every day millions of Americans interact with these creatures, encountering advanced technology from nuanced natural language routines to gesture recognition to machine learning.