Lies, Damned Lies, and Robots

Oh, great. Just when we've been facing a world where lies are commonplace, now we're automating them. According to an article in Discover, Swiss researchers have managed to create some robots that would learn from their environment - and that included learning to lie to other robots when it came to sources of power to recharge their batteries. There were spots that would charge batteries and those that would discharge them:

By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

I hear that by the 53rd generation, they started running for office.