The deceitful machine

A recent paper from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab describes how its researchers have used machine learning to train chatbot "dialogue agents" to negotiate. I first came across this development as reported by the website Futurism. Negotiating complex information technology services deals was how I made my living for many years, and so the news that artificial intelligence (AI) could one day take the place of a negotiator made me sit bolt upright. I perused the FAIR report, which in its abstract says that much of human dialogue occurs in semi-cooperative settings, where agents with different goals attempt to agree on common decisions. Negotiations require complex communication and reasoning skills, but success--arriving at a deal--is easy to measure, which made this an interesting task for its AI research.