2018 paper showed that two machine learning algorithms in a situation like the book-pricing setup above, each given the task of setting a price that maximizes profits, can learn to collude with each other in a way that’s both highly sophisticated and highly illegal. They can do this without explicitly being taught to collude and without communicating directly with each other—somehow, they manage to set up a price-fixing scheme just by observing each other’s prices. This has only been demonstrated in a simulation so far, not in a real-world pricing scenario. But people have estimated that a
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