May I have your attention please you can now book your train tickets on Uber and get

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Trains, now on Uber. T's and C's apply. Check the Uber app.

This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

Last year, Google unveiled Duplex, its artificial intelligence-powered assistant.

How's something out here?

Hi, I'm calling the book a woman's haircut for a client.

I'm looking for something on May 3rd.

That's a robot.

Sure.

Give me one second.

Mm-hmm.

The machine assistant never identified itself as a bot in the demo and Google got a lot of

flack for that. They later clarified that they would only launch the tech with quote disclosure

built in. But therein lies a dilemma because a new study in the journal Nature

Machine Intelligence suggests that a bot is most effective when it hides its

machine identity. That is if it is allowed to pose as human.

Tla Raha'an is a computational social scientist at New York University's campus in Abu Dhabi.

His team recruited nearly 700 online volunteers to play the Prisoner's dilemma, a classic game of negotiation, trust, and

deception against either humans or bots. Half the time the human players were told the truth

about who they were matched up against. The other half they were

...