Here’s a bedtime story your children will tell their children in order to scare them silly.

engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have constructed a bot that not only dupes its competitors, but actively lies, cheats, hides and steals to accomplish its treacherous goals. According to Tech’s Ronald Arkin, the group of scientists “developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machines,” while also developing ” techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered.”

Basically, when being pursued or tracked by an enemy, the running-robot recognizes the threatening situation, sends false signals and forges a trail in one direction before doubling back to hide. During tests, the stealth-bot successfully eluded its tracker 75-percent of the time. While the benefits seem numerous, particularly the potential for dispatching covert communications, Arkin claims to recognize the project’s “ethical implications” and “deleterious aspects.”

And yet, they did it anyway. When you look up “foolhardy” in future dictionaries you won’t find a damn thing. Because the robots will have destroyed all the dictionaries and the humans that made them.

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