Microsoft was recently forced to wash Tay, its Twitter bot’s, mouth out with soap for the foul and abusive language it was using online. In its defence it was just doing what it was programmed to do, use its vast database of information; listen to, learn from and engage with its community in a purposeful and relevant way and as soon as the community smelt a bot and not a human behind the keyboard some of them set about getting it into trouble and soon had it making racist, foul and inappropriate comments in reply to what the community was telling an asking it.

This was as good a place as any for radio HK3’s Phil Whelan and I to start our regular chat, this week looking at the Artificial Intelligence and its possible uses and abuses.

The others story that caught our attention this week was Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant, commenting that if requested to it could use its database of 1.35 billion Chinese citizens and its 657 million Chinese map subscribers to predict imminent crowd gathering, possible intent and behavior.

Artificial Intelligence is a machine’s ability to quickly find, assemble and try to make sense out of vast amounts of data and as we get better at getting it to “think” we are going to have to get better at teaching it how to it effectively, within the parameters of culture sensitivities and also set human rules around when, where, how this synthetic brain can be used.

As always a provocative conversation (16 minutes 52 seconds), take a listen now and add your human thoughts to the rise of AI.