How Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform the world

It's hard to predict how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will behave. In 2016, Microsoft released Tay, an AI Twitter bot designed to interact with people through conversational language and get smarter along the way by observing, learning and mimicking. The designers perhaps underestimated the Twitterati's penchant for mischief. Soon after Tay was launched, people started sending it racist, misogynistic and hateful tweets. And Tay, true to design, absorbed and internalised this behaviour, and began tweeting similar nasty sentiments back at them. Microsoft had to scramble and work overtime to delete the offensive tweets.