Bots Need to Learn Some Manners, and It's on Us to Teach Them

Suddenly the whole tech industry is knee-deep in AI-powered assistants that live within apps, performing simple, menial tasks for you, saving you time and keeping you productive. Just this month, Microsoft and Facebook released developer tools that make building bots for their platforms easier than ever. Given the scale at which companies like Microsoft and Facebook and WeChat hope to see bots deployed, it's reasonable to worry about how much human oversight the technology might have. And here is where programmers must show caution. Improperly trained or monitored bots can turn ugly when exposed to humans. Don't worry, it's not like there's any danger (yet) of a robot uprising, but unscrupulous types have used bots to deceive people, and everyone saw what happened when Microsoft let Tay run amok.