The military's expert research and development arm isn't always about making bigger, better things that blow up or fly fast, sometimes it wants to develop monster brain power. In this case it wants to build avant-garde artificial intelligence (AI) software known as a Machine Reading Program (MRP) that can capture knowledge from naturally occurring text and transform it into the formal representations used by AI reasoning systems.
The idea is that such an intelligent learning system would unleash a wide variety of new AI applications - military and civilian -- ranging from intelligent bots to personal tutors according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
For example, all of the text in the World Wide Web will become available for automating the monitoring and analysis of technological and political activities of nations; plans, rhetoric, and activities of transnational organizations; and scientific discovery within various disciplines, DARPA stated. As digitized text from library books world wide becomes available, new avenues of cultural awareness and historical research will be enabled. With truly general techniques for effectively handling the incompatibilities between natural language and the language of formal inference, a system could, in principal, be constructed that maps between natural and formal languages in any subject domain, DARPA said.
DARPA said that nearly all successful AI systems today succeed because they possess sufficient consistent, relevant knowledge about a given problem. However, since large amounts of knowledge are almost always needed for this success, AI systems require this knowledge to be expressed in a logical formula of some type. Manually encoding such knowledge can become prohibitively expensive. Since text is, by far, the most flexible and ubiquitous medium used to capture knowledge about the diverse areas of human interest, it is natural to consider making it feasible for AI reasoning systems to employ this vast store of human knowledge. As AI systems currently cannot use such knowledge, it would be revolutionary if technology could be developed to bridge this gap, DARPA said.
The problem is reading and understanding mostly. The necessary information is available, but rarely in a form that can be used by current AI systems, DARPA said. For example, the military frequently faces impediments to stability and reconstruction operations in a new location due to the lack of understanding of the local situation. Similarly, strategic assessment of a foreign nation's science and technology base involves the continuous assessment of technical articles, bibliographies and conference agendas. This information is often available on the Web, and some tools to assist this analysis are available, but the process would be significantly enhanced by a system that could directly analyze the information found in these text sources. The same reasoning could be equally valuable if applied to other types of open-source intelligence analysis, including assessing military readiness and posturing; political speeches, actions, and more obscure messages; economic trends and sentiments; and propaganda from terrorist groups and even their hidden web-based communications.
DARPA lists some the technological goals of the new AI system as follows:
NLP and AI reasoning into new technology that provides the benefits of both.
How such software will ultimately be contracted and developed will be big issues themselves. Some of the requirements are extensive.
DARPA has been interested in exploiting the promise of AI for years. Earlier this year it approved the second phase of artificial intelligence technology that will help automate military air traffic control. The Generalized Integrated Learning Architecture (GILA) system, developed by Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories under a $22 million, 48-month contract, is intended to help the Air Force in particular keep airspace operating safely with increased air traffic and the advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other airborne weapons.
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It's seems to me that a high level self learning AI that compiles knowledge from text, especially the text available on the internet is a "bad idea".
Bad as in a potentially extinction level event or perhaps just the end of freedom for mankind.
Think about it. Think it all the way through.
PS. The three laws don't protect us here. Especially if followed to the letter by said AI.
A long way
There is a long way from reading to comprehending (see licensed specialists in IT today)! No reason to be afraid about AI but the people interpreting what AI means with it's reading will be a problem as today. AI may or may not suffer the same cultural and inherited problems and limitations as humans depending if it's on purpose programmed / advised that way. And I'm afraid of that - never failed throughout the history, words as Heimat, sorry homeland, etc still work wonders for leaders.
Anyhow - this is good. The better the reading, NLP, etc get the easier and faster the communication gets between different cultures, groups, ideas, etc. AI systems work today but, as the article says, feeding the information for them is a huge task. The last system I did was canceled after 10 years just for that. Now - add the spoken language to that system, visuals, and so on - the future.
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