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A Peek Inside DARPA's Current Projects
dthomas731 writes to tell us that Computerworld has a brief article on some of DARPA's current projects. From the article: "Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to 'automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.' At that point, perhaps DARPA's PAL could be renamed HAL, for Hearing Assistant That Learns. The original HAL, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, tells the astronauts how it knows they're plotting to disconnect it: 'Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.'"
The DoD funds a huge percentage of AI research, but at the end of the day they're interested in things that can be easily weaponized or used for simple intelligence sifting heuristics. The most fundamentally interesting research in AI is in the humanoid robotics projects such as those at the MIT shop, and it is from these more humanly-modeled projects that anything like HAL could ever issue. Search-digest heuristics like PAL aren't much like humans and will never lead to anything approching a human's contextually rich understanding of the world at large any more than really advanced racecar design will lead to interstellar craft.
The difference, as Searle would say, between Strong (humanlike) AI and Weak (software widget like) AI is a difference of type, not scale.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to "automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."
PAL's role here is not clear. The 'easier' task would be to monitor the body language of the two conversers and, by lining up a list of tasks with the observation of their head movements, correctly predict which points in the conversation were the ones where someone performed an "agreement" gesture.
The much, much more difficult task would be to actually read lips. There are only certain properties of phonemes you can deduce from how the lips and jaw move; many, many other features of speech are lost. Only when you supply the machine with a limited set of words in a limited topic domain do you get good performance; otherwise, you're grasping at straws. And then taking out most of the speech signal? Please.
But no, DARPA is cool and will save all the translators in Iraq (by 2009, well before the war ends.) PR and vaporware win the day!
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.