Last year, Facebook created two chatbots and asked them to begin talking to each other, practicing their negotiation skills. The bots, it turns out, were pretty good at negotiating—but they did it using their own made-up language that was incomprehensible to humans.
This is where the world is going. Computers are creating content for each other, not us. Pictures are being taken by computers, for other computers to view and interpret. It’s all happening quietly, often without our knowledge or consent.
So learning how to see like a computer—making these machine-to-machine communications visible—may be the most important skill of the 21st century.
