Robots will be more useful if they are made to lack confidence

Confidence in your abilities is usually a good thing – as long as you can recognise when it's time to ask for help. As we build ever smarter software, we may want to apply the same thinking to machines. An experiment that explores a robot's sense of its own usefulness could help guide how future artificial intelligences are built. Overconfident AI can cause all kinds of problems, says Dylan Hadfield-Menell at the University of California, Berkeley. Take Facebook's newsfeed algorithms, for example.