Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Wants To Build an AI To Find the Patterns Hidden in Global Chaos (techcrunch.com)
A new program at DARPA is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It's called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas. From a report: "Schema" in this case has a very specific meaning. It's the idea of a basic process humans use to understand the world around them by creating little stories of interlinked events. For instance when you buy something at a store, you know that you generally walk into the store, select an item, bring it to the cashier, who scans it, then you pay in some way, and then leave the store. This "buying something" process is a schema we all recognize, and could of course have schemas within it (selecting a product; payment process) or be part of another schema (gift giving; home cooking).
Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they're surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They're familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they're not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That's what DARPA wants to look into.
Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they're surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They're familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they're not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That's what DARPA wants to look into.
Patterns, sure. But is it worthwhile to know them?
Um...."Follow the money"..???
We need an AI to figure this out? Really?
>> a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them.
This sound like a marketing question. As in, "how well are the talking points from various agencies and political groups represented in the media." There are communications firms that perform this type of analysis today on the messages they try to get out into the public (e.g., "this statistic we created - that's just a little bit off the official one so we can track it - has been republished in 228 news stories in the past 6 months").
Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they're surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand.
Perhaps Dijkstra would prove enlightening here.
Anyone else?
Now. Before it's too late!
So watching Fox News (or MSNBC, etc) is going to answer this perennial college sophomore question? Couldn't we just watch Three Days of The Condor instead?
AI is not "god"
They continually find the most moronic tasks to put it to work on.
Reinforcement learning with memory would be a start.
Mr KAIROS doesn't have the same ring to it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Just ask Harold from Person of Interest, he'll do it for just one dollar but there is a catch. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Fredrick Brooks was absolutely correct. There is no silver bullet in programming.
I think the problem described above "buy something" has an analog in the Object Oriented programming mind set, where the process of buying something can be defined in more and more detail... So you abstract "Buy something".... "In a store" or "online"... "Using a credit card"..... Just like we abstracted "Vehicle" which is "A Car" has "an engine" and the like.
Brooks was right, programming takes effort and AI isn't the answer.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This won't work, and a lot of money will be sent down the toilet over it. They'll find lots of correlations that they will think are meaningful, but aren't, while wasting vast amounts of time and resources.
They're either buying into the same marketing and media hype for the half-assed excuse for AI everyone keeps trotting out, or they've got something nobody else has, meaning general AI. The latter is highly unlikely, if they did we wouldn't be hearing about it at all.
I guess if anyone has the budget for something like this, it's DARPA, but my mind would be blown if this were anywhere near useful in less than 50-70 years. Predicting markets alone would be an incredibly daunting task to try and handle with AI, let alone something as generic as "schemas".
This sounds perfectly backwards to me. A "cold war" and a "bear market" are excellent examples of two concepts that are highly flawed as descriptions of any real-world situation that has ever existed. They are too tiny. They are imprecise. They gloss over extremely important differences between any two instances of the "same" schemas. We just need them because we are only human! The promise of AI is to free us from that constraint, and to understand the world (or at least to predict and manipulate it) at another level entirely.
They just want to see how well their control the narrative program is working, since propaganda falsehoods were made legal by the previous administration. Not making it up: https://phys.org/news/2011-10-... I assume most here are old enough to know what was in the NDAA and when it was signed?
But it's all the latest guy's fault, right?
NO politician is innocent, in truth. The reality is more like HItchhiker's guide = their job is to distract attention from the real power.
This has been going on for all of the many decades I've watched events. No politician is innocent, and for quite some time, there's been no war they didn't like. No big financial crime that wasn't "too big to jail". And a lot of more contentious items that are partisan, which in my view is just the bread and circuses used to distract us while the real power runs off with the rest of our wealth and individual freedom.
In other words, A Conspiracy Theory AI
Move over Alex Jones, you got competition.
Roger C. Schank, Robert P. Abelson et al did this decades ago. What DARPA calls a "schema" was called a "script' by Schank. His most-referenced book was "Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures "
I am quite astonished to find the DARPA reference b/c I know that there are literally hundreds of DOD-related systems that use ideas from Schank and others to gather and correlate intelligence and make suggestions for action. These are not new systems, most have been in the field for at least a decade. So it's as if DARPA has been hiding use of AI for decades and is now beginning to release it for commercial use.
I'd like to have dinner with Jenna Coleman. The likelihood of either scenario is slim to none. #millennialalert
Human intuition has more play in stuff like this and AI is a poor substitute.
AI would be good at watching large swaths of data like the stock market tickers and see who dives first or wins the day but anyone with a watch list could preform that task as well.
I regularly visit your site and find a lot of interesting information. Not only good posts but also great comments. Thank you and look forward to your page growing stronger spanish to english
This machine will process exabytes of data for hundreds of years then tell us in a grand statement that the cause of all chaos and strife is people being stupid and greedy.
I swear to god that this is the identical the plot to a James Bond flick - "A global network identifying patterns in chaos".
Hmm.. I think this is a dangerous path to take. We should all start learning how to write code to destroy neural nets now.
the news posting kinda sounded like text taken from the US TV Series "Person of Interest"
I think we are taking a dangerous path with AI. I used to be intrigued by it, writing object recognition and tracking modules utilizing OpenCV and Tensorflow.
I even added to code to my robot rover to track and annoy my dog.. until my dog finally took a piss on it.
That's what we have to do. Take a piss on AI. Take your Google Home, or Amazon Alexa device, and destroy it. I put mine in an old microwave.
My rover bot now uses good old SLAM navigation instead of using OpenCV and TensorFlow.
I mean it.. can you imagine what could result from a DARPA funded KAIROS project ? Not good for anyone.
It's time to end it now.
"I am a prototype for a much larger system."
This is a great idea - perhaps we should go ahead and name it "The Director". All hail the Director or else you will be over-written!
Didn't Jeff Goldblum prove this as impossible in Jerrassic Park. With just a drop of water? Stop wasting taxpayer money!!
What are you talking about?
AlphaZero represents a colossal silver bullet over the tradition of hand-crafted alpha-beta implementations.
Ken Thompson actually said of his hardware implementation of Belle that the only reason it won is because their software had fewer bugs. (Bugs in a minimax algorithm are often subtle and hard to notice, so long as it always returns a legal move, and almost always returns something better than a blithering blunder.)
Getting it to work with the specialized hardware forces the programmer to clear his or her mind to a higher level.
(Gimli: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. Aragorn: It's the beards.)
Few, if any, of this category of historical bugs exists in AlphaZero. It's pretty easy to keep your eye on the accuracy of a high-speed matrix multiply (extremely potent reductive invariant simply begs to be checked). All of the engineering is focused on backbone algorithms. All of the fussy, detailed, error-prone heuristics are manna from heaven.
This is absolutely a silver bullet, by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, it requires a C4 explosive GHz GPU instead of black powder MHz CPU, so this particular bullet was not available to computational antiquity.
Sheesh: a silver bullet plummets down from the heavens, and nearly strikes us dead in the nads, and we're so deeply invested in Stockholm syndrome (a sixty-year captivity of brittle, hand-coded heuristics) that don't even notice its inherent silverbulletness.
"Waaa! But I wanted a silver bullet that better helped me to continue to do it the wrong way!"
If you're that addicted to doing it the wrong way, admit it: you're not in the market for a sliver bullet, you're in the market for a magic mushroom.
OMG it spells Bilderberg!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
the machine.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.