DARPA Wants To Build 'Contextual' AI That Understands the World (venturebeat.com)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies, is one of the birthplaces of machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that mimics the behavior of neurons in the brain. Dr. Brian Pierce, director of DARPA's Innovation Office, spoke about the agency's recent efforts at a VentureBeat summit. From the report: One area of study is so-called "common sense" AI -- AI that can draw on environmental cues and an understanding of the world to reason like a human. Concretely, DARPA's Machine Common Sense Program seeks to design computational models that mimic core domains of cognition: objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). "You could develop a classifier that could identify a number of objects in an image, but if you ask a question, you're not going to get an answer," Pierce said. "We'd like to get away from having an enormous amount of data to train neural networks [and] get away with using fewer labels [to] train models." The agency's also pursuing explainable AI (XAI), a field which aims to develop next-generation machine learning techniques that explain a given system's rationale. "[It] helps you to understand the bounds of the system, which can better inform the human user," Pierce said.

Comments

Re:I want a pony

[hey!]

The thing is... if you understood what it entailed, you probably *wouldn't* want a pony. That may make it the perfect analogy. I imagine a scene playing out like this:

Military officer: What progress do you have to report?

Researcher 1: Er...

Researcher 2 [smoothly interjecting]: This AI has developed an understanding of the world at roughly equivalent to that of most human beings.

Officer: Excellent. I am off now to tell the Pentagon we can build it into all our weapon systems.

[Officer leaves]

Researcher 1: Shouldn't you have told him the AI hates America?