Explaining the concept, Professor Nick Jennings said “Computer agents don’t get bored, they have a lot of time, and they don’t get embarrassed. I have always thought that in an internet environment, negotiation is the way to go.” He added that a sequence of rules named heuristics are commonly used in computer science to determine the best solution, and that the AI’s will be working on this basis.

“We use heuristics to determine what price we should offer during the negotiation – and also how we might deal with multiple negotiations at the same time.” He added that “We have to factor in some degrees of uncertainty as well – the chances are that sellers will enter into more negotiations than they have stock.”

For the process to work both seller and buyer are asked a number of questions. Sellers input data on discounts, how much they want a sale, and if they’d fall to a lower price at a certain time within the day. Likewise buyers are assessed for the items they are looking for and how much they would pay. An AI negotiator then searches for appropriate matches, passing information back and forth between the two individuals until either a sale is made, or the buyer goes elsewhere.

Professor Jennings said “Fixed pricing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout history most transactions have been negotiated. Only in the last 100 years have we gone for fixed pricing.”

Talking to a gathering in London, Professor Sharkey expressed warnings that current technology does not allow for robots and AI’s to distinguish enemy from ally, and that the work needed to allow such an artificial system could take 50 years. He said “Robots that can decide where to kill, who to kill and when to kill is high on all the military agendas.” He added that US military ethics concerning robots were highly misguided because they were “all based on artificial intelligence, and the military have a strange view of artificial intelligence based on science fiction.”

Explaining that he wasn’t acting as an anti-war protestor, but simply a concerned citizen, he said that even though military use of robot technology was increasing, “collateral damage” hadn’t decreased. There were 60 cases of robot attacks in Pakistan from January 2006 to April 2009, and reiterating the case for danger to the general public, Professor Sharkey said that though these attacks had killed 14 al-Qaeda, they had also taken the lives of 687 civilians.

However, a recent report by the US Air Force found that robotic attack planes were still favourable. The “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047” report said that “Advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decision and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”