DARPA Wants to Build Computers With 'Common Sense'
DARPA Wants to Build Computers With 'Common Sense'
It’s one of the many programs the agency will
fund under its $2 billion next-generation artificial intelligence initiative.
Even today’s most advanced artificial
intelligence tools lack the common sense that lets humans move through the
world, but the Pentagon’s research wing is kicking off a program to instill
computers with knowledge people often take for granted.
The Machine Common Sense program, launched Oct.
19 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will explore multiple
methods for teaching computers broad strategies for navigating the world.
Today’s AI tools can only be trained in highly
specialized tasks, but through the program, DARPA intends to give the
technology a basic, widely applicable toolbox for solving problems. AI with
common sense wouldn’t need computer scientists to explicitly tell them, for
instance, that gravity always makes objects fall to the ground or living things
need food to survive. Like humans, the machine would understand the concepts
intuitively.
It marks DARPA’s latest effort to build
so-called “third wave” artificial intelligence tools,
which are able to apply reasoning and contextual awareness across a variety of
different scenarios.
“The absence of common sense prevents
intelligent systems from understanding their world, behaving reasonably in
unforeseen situations, communicating naturally with people and learning from
new experiences,” DARPA wrote in the program announcement.
“Its absence is perhaps the most significant barrier between the narrowly
focused AI applications we have today and the more general, human-like AI
systems we would like to build in the future.”
The program will explore two different
strategies for building foundations of common sense into AI tools.
In one track, teams will develop systems for
teaching machines through experience, mimicking the way babies grow to
understand the world. Using computer models to simulate the physical world,
groups would give AI tools an understanding of basic physics, spatial reasoning
and the motivations of outside actors.
DARPA is recruiting a separate team to test and
compare AI tools against three different areas of cognitive milestones in
children ages zero to 18 months old: prediction and expectation, experience
learning and problem-solving.
In the other track, groups would create a
program that scrapes public websites and databases to ingrain AI tools a set of
“broad common knowledge. DARPA intends the software to allow AI tools to answer
questions about the real world based on images and natural language.
Research is scheduled to begin June 2019 and
last for about four years. Proposals are due Dec. 18.
The program announcement comes as DARPA
determines how to best divvy up some $2 billion over the next five years
to advance the foundations of artificial intelligence. The campaign, dubbed AI
Next, is focused on cementing the U.S. as a global leader in the emerging
technology as rivals like China pour billions into advancing their own
artificial intelligence economies.
A DARPA spokesperson told Nextgov funding for the Machine Common Sense program
will come from that $2 billion pool.
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