Mysterious language of chatbots and robots in care homes

Care homes in the UK will use robots. Among their tasks will be, i.e. having simple conversations with residents which improve people’s mental health and reduces loneliness, according to an international trial. The robots move independently, gesture, and can learn personal interests and backgrounds. They can also play music, teach languages, and offer practical help, including medicine reminders. Robots are to help the care homes’ staff not replace it.

In stadiums, hospitals, on the airports, and in public transport in the United States robots are cleaning, disinfecting, and eradicating germs with the UV lights. According to researchers epidemics of illness, public health crisis, and the recessions to come after will cause automatization and lasting changes in the labor market. Robots will replace mostly custodial workers and those employed in retail.

Facebook abandoned the negotiation experiment with two artificially intelligent chatbots. During the conversation between the programs, they started to use their own, altered version of English that made their task easier but was incomprehensible to the engineers overlooking the experiment. The chatbots were negotiating over trading books, hats, and balls. Some of the negotiations conducted in the bizarre language ended up successfully. Programs also were able to pretend interest in one particular object, to get better negotiating terms when resigning from it. The experiment was terminated by researchers, not due to fear but because the aim of it was to work on communication between chatbots and humans, not between the programs.