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Military Set To Develop Smart, Robotic Cameras
coondoggie writes "In a move seemingly straight out of the Terminator movies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said it has contracted with 15 companies or universities to begin building software and hardware that will give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."
It'll be a long time before anything is produced to replace a human's decision making and observation skills.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Unfortunately DARPA failed to realize that afterwards the robots simply sat around and watched Futurama and porn all day.
We're a hellova lot closer than we were 20 years ago. We already have vision systems that do a respectable job of watching crowds of people and picking out faces of suspects.
A company called Vitamin-D has taken the Numenta HTM framework and created an inexpensive version of vision technology using standard webcams that's really pretty impressive (http://www.vitamindinc.com). It's not perfect but it probably does a better job than a $10/hr security guard falling asleep while supposedly watching the video for suspicious activity.
Are we there yet? No, but we are closer than we were, and if we don't expend the effort to get there we never will.
As far as "Go" - that's a tough nut to crack and it's considered even more difficult than chess to write a decent computer player. Nonetheless, that latest programs achieve rankings near the top (dan-3), placing them among the best (human) players in the world. It's only a matter of time until (like chess) a practically unbeatable program is created.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.