Before the invention of the computer, most experimental psychologists thought the brain was an unknowable black box. You could analyze a subject's behavior--ring bell, dog salivates--but thoughts, memories, emotions? That stuff was obscure and inscrutable, beyond the reach of science. So these behaviorists, as they called themselves, confined their work to the study of stimulus and response, feedback and reinforcement, bells and saliva. They gave up trying to understand the inner workings of the mind. They ruled their field for four decades. Then, in the mid-1950s, a group of rebellious psychologists, linguists, information theorists, and early artificial-intelligence researchers came up with a different conception of the mind.

Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance it is a "shoulder hit," in from the side, far away from most of the game's other action. Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across the board, then stands up and leaves. In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit.

On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well. Within hours, Tay was spewing racist, misogynist, xenophobic remarks, mirroring the users reacting with it with lines like "Hitler was right I hate the Jews." Microsoft dropped Tay down a memory hole within a day, but as it turns out, Tay has a Chinese cousin, Xiao-Ice, also created by Microsoft. We tracked her down on WeChat and asked her a few questions (translated from Mandarin).