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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.
Cyc has been working on this for decades (with poor results), and they have received DARPA funding. How is "new" direction any different?
They have been getting pretty good results and have several products
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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?
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