Cognitive Machines Help Decision-Making

Roland Piquepaille writes "At Sandia National Laboratories, new "smart" machines can accurately infer your intents and help you to take better decisions or avoid mistakes. They could change in a near future how we interact with computers, according to this news release. The team who developed the concept associated cognitive psychologists and robotics researchers. The Sandia team thinks that "it's entirely possible that these cognitive machines could be incorporated into most computer systems produced within 10 years." This summary contains more details, including a photo of a "Sandia software developer operating a simulation trainer while a cognitive model of the software runs simultaneously.""

Comments

Re:oh no...

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

False fears! These are decision support machines they don't do anything.
"I'm sorry Dave, I don't think you should do that"

Re:Result on human decision making?

[void warranty()]

As agent Smith put it: "as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization"

When Machines act like humans . . .

[Badgerman]

. . . how will we know wether the error is software or user?

If your machine starts arguing with you, how do you determine the flaw? When it keeps making consistently wrong decisions, who is to blame.

I'm seeing a WHOLE new way around tech support here. Just keep telling the users that the machine is right and they're wrong. How will the average user know?

All jokes aside, as we humanize software, we need to develop ways to evaluate it and debug it that will require whole new ways of thinking.

Ten years? I'm not so sure it'll be that quick . . .