I personally think that this is a great idea-- make it all public!

I think Warren Ellis had a pretty awesome vision in Transmetropolitan when whatever happens in public spaces becomes accessible to anyone, at any time-- truly publicly available, as many of us want "public" data to be.

I used to work for a government data archive in the burgeoning days of the internet, and they didn't want to make data downloadable-- even though it had to be legally available to the public!-- because they didn't it want to be THAT public. People who didn't understand it, or people who had malicious intentions would have access to it. But you know what? Public is public is public, and technology keeps on making it easier for more and more people to see those public things. CC:TV footage should stream online, and soon there'll be a brigade of human eyes looking out for criminals (and for ways to exploit other people, and to police the police) through those electronic eyes. When they start putting CCTV in your living room, I say THEN you worry.

So yeah, the idea of "deception" is a human construct, as is the idea of "evil." And one could argue (as a previous poster did) that successive generations developing behaviors which are in their own self interest (so they get more food) but may (as a byproduct) be deleterious to others (since they get less food) is not a surprise. But extrapolate this to humans, and you get the kinds of behaviors that we call "deceptive" and, since we have ideas about the virtue of altruism, we call such behaviors "evil." This is experiment is definitely interesting in terms of group dynamics and behavior, and also because the novelty of the robots' solution to their problem is interesting-- two very different lines of thought. This kind of "deception" is one obvious and common solution to the problem of limited supply and competitive demand.

Deception is most interesting, I think, when you pair it with understanding of the "other" --that one is not merely making a strategy to get more food, but that in the process one is taking that food from others. So when humans and our closest relatives practice deceptive behaviors (which are surely-- and here demonstrably-- evolutionarily beneficial) it's complicated by our... moral sense? Altruistic tendencies? That's fascinating! When robots start to develop guilt complexes for their deceptive behaviors and guiltily hand over their food to others when caught in the act, I'll be impressed.

We are not using the term "deception" here in it's standard (moral) sense, which would indicate knowledge that another individual is being "fooled."