Holy crap! The Age of The Machines is nigh: a bunch of scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other. Okay, so they don’t swill beer or put bends in girders–they just communicate to each other with benign flashing lights, thank goodness, instead of using lasers to destroy humans:The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for “food” targets nearby while avoiding “poison.” Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.

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