While developing countries are hungry for agricultural knowledge, the developed world is using millions of tons of pesticides and herbicides where it could have been avoided. A company called Blue River Technology came up with the solution and introduced its LettuceBot which looks like a typical tractor but in reality, is a machine-learning powered equipment. The bot can roll through a field and photograph up to 5,000 young plants every minute, using algorithms to identify plants as sprouts, weeds or lettuce. If it spots a lettuce that is not growing right, it will spray it too, to help create a more uniform and healthy crop. Considering that the only alternative is the traditional approach of spraying herbicides on everything, the method could be revolutionary.

Content-neutral algorithms can be dangerous enough on Twitter, and Microsoft's inability to safeguard the technology against this kind of issue would set off alarm bells in even the most tech-friendly. The mind jumps - irrationally, perhaps - to sci-fi movies in which a robot becomes intelligent enough to become insubordinate and therefore dangerous. We have been, in many ways, programmed to fear such an AI rebellion, with pop culture obsessed for decades with the notion that our machines could one day rise up and rule us. And Microsoft's experiment highlighted something even more revealing - the AI itself is not the danger, it is its misuse. Twitter trolls worked tirelessly to corrupt Tay, and the result was emphatic.