Attributed to Juvenal,a this title phrase translates to "Who will watch the watchers?" In the 21st century, we may well ask this question as we invest increasingly in machine learning methods, platforms, applications, and designs. Nowhere is this more evident as we see increased excitement and investment in artificial intelligence (AI) for military application. In some ways, this is an old story. Early computers were used to improve the calculation of ballistics settings and, with the invention of radar, automatic fire-control systems became important parts of offensive and defensive systems.

It's been fascinating to watch the storm over Microsoft's AI Twitter chat bot, Tay, which learned extreme racism, homophobia, and drug culture from internet trolls and was hastily taken offline. As one commentator put, it went from saying "humans are super cool", to extolling Nazi values in less than 24 hours – a useful analog of extremism's connection with ignorance in a meme-propelled culture. But were trolls solely to blame? As journalist Paul Mason noted in his Guardian blog, Tay was essentially feeding off the deep undercurrents of prejudice and hate speech that lurk near the surface of many social platforms. Or at least they do in the West.

The lure of understanding biological intelligence has long occupied researchers. Success has always been measured in peer review, number of citations, or how influential some piece of work is in inspiring the next generation of re- searchers. What human-robot interaction (HRI) and artificial intelligence (AI) promises is a metric of believability that is not intrinsic to the values of the researcher or community of practice but to the utility and successful function of the robotic artifact within a larger society. This paper is a reflec- tion and response to the hypothesis that HRI is a pure, funda- mental art of artificial intelligence and the last great successor to a domain fraught with the trappings of an art that lost its way.