Pentagon Explores a New Frontier In the World of Virtual Intelligence
By REUTERSMAY 30, 2003
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The Pentagon is shopping for ways to capture everything a person sees, says and hears, as part of a project it says is meant to help create smarter robots.
The projected system, called LifeLog, would take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone. The idea is to index the material and make patterns easily retrievable, in an effort to make machines think more like people, learning from experience.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon's cradle for new technologies, is sponsoring a competition for proposals to set up such a system.
The project could result in more effective computers capable of building on a user's past and interpreting his or her commands, said Jan Walker, a Darpa spokeswoman.
Ms. Walker said the new project had nothing to do with the agency's Terrorist Information Awareness program, formerly called Total Information Awareness – a research initiative, criticized by civil liberties groups, to create a vast computer-based surveillance system intended to thwart terrorism.
The goal of LifeLog is to create a searchable database of human lives, initially those of the developers, to promote artificial intelligence, the agency said. The technology would advance a new class of systems able to reason in a number of ways, learn from experience and respond in a robust manner to surprises, the agency's Information Processing Technology Office said.
To do so, the office said, the system must index the details of daily life and make it possible to infer the user's routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task.
Darpa said any proposals from developers would have to address human subject approval, data privacy and security, copyright and legal considerations that would affect the LifeLog development process.
Steven Aftergood, who tracks government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said he was not prepared to call the LifeLog initiative illegitimate. But, you know, it's one more program that demands vigilant oversight, he said. The more personal experience that can be captured by digital means, the more vulnerable that experience is to unwanted surveillance.