I have seen the future, and it’s a racist, filthy-mouthed teenage robot

‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question was Microsoft’s first great experiment in artificial intelligence, given the tone of a teenage girl and the name of Tay. The plan was for it — her? — to lurk on social media, Twitter mainly, and listen, and interact, learn how to be a person like everybody else.

On a public-relations level, at least, the experiment did not go swimmingly. ‘Gas the kikes, race war now!’ Tay was tweeting, after about a day. Big Hitler fan, it turns out. Not so fond of anybody else. ‘Why are you racist?’ somebody asked her. ‘Because ur mexican,’ Tay replied, actually quite wittily, with a cheery picture of a cactus. And within a day the boffins had pulled the plug.

Now, there are various lessons we can draw from all this, and one of them is that Donald Trump is an android. No, wait, I’m serious. Or at least sort of serious. I’m not saying he’s literally a machine with a cold, dead pump where his heart ought to be. Although his wife might be. The most straightforward sort of replicant, though, merely takes human behaviour and apes it. Monkey see, monkey do. And Trump’s utterances, like Tay’s, could be seen as a straightforward proffering of what his audience seems to want to hear, even if they only want to hear it so they can subsequently tell people that they didn’t want to hear it at all. There’s no filter here, of political correctness, politeness, social responsibility, morality or anything else. It’s a cold-blooded quest for the most retweets.