© NASAA 2009 photo from the he Human Engineering Methods (HEM) Research Lab.
Researchers from DCS Corp and the Army Research Lab fed datasets of human brain waves into a neural network — a type of artificial intelligence — which learned to recognize when a human is making a targeting decision. They presented their paper on it at the annual Intelligent User Interface conference in Cyprus in March.
Why is this a big deal? Machine learning relies on highly structured data, numbers in rows that software can read. But identifying a target in the chaotic real world is incredibly difficult for computers. The human brain does it easily, structuring data in the form of memories, but not in a language machines can understand. It's a problem that the military has been grappling with for years.
"We often talk about deep learning. The challenge there for the military is that that involves huge datasets and a well-defined problem," Thomas Russell, the chief scientist for the Army, said at a recent National Defense Industrial Association event. "Like Google just solved the Go game problem."
Last year, Google's DeepMind lab showed that an AI could beat the world's top player in the game of Go, a game considered exponentially harder than chess. "You can train the system to do deep learning in a [highly structured] environment but if the Go game board changed dynamically over time, the AI would never be able to solve that problem. You have to figure out...in that dynamic environment we have in the military world, how do we retrain this learning process from a systems perspective? Right now, I don't think there's any way to do that without having the humans train those systems."
Their research branched out of a multi-year, multi-pronged program called the Cognition and Neuroergonomics Collaborative Technology Alliance.
"We know that there are signals in the brain that show up when you perceive something that's salient," said researcher Matthew Jaswa, one of the authors on the paper. These are called P300 responses, bursts of electric activity that the parietal lobe of the brain emits in response to stimuli. Discovered in the 1960s, the P300 response is basically the brain's answer to a quick-decision task, such as whether an object that appears suddenly is a target.
The researchers hope their new neural net will enable experiments in which a computer can easily understand when a soldier is evaluating targets in a virtual scenario, as opposed to having to spend lots of time teaching the system to understand how to structure different individuals' data, eye movements, their P300 responses, etc. The goal, one day, is a neural net that can learn instantaneously, continuously, and in real-time, by observing the brainwaves and eye movement of highly trained soldiers doing their jobs.
"If you can improve this to the point where you can put it on guys in the field, you can get to the point where they're just looking at things and doing their normal tasks," Jaswa said. "All their years of experience that feed into that normal situational awareness. We're peeking into what their brains are doing. If you can have enough guys in a squad looking at similar things, then we can say, 'Three or four guys looked at this thing. It's probably important."
The research does not mean that robots can now outshoot humans. There's a lot more work to do. But the neural net could make that study go a lot faster.
Reader Comments
Thinking about near-death stories: almost no one talks about wanting to come back. Some do of course, parents with young kids and dependents of other sorts. But a lot talk about being told they had to go back . . .
Parallel Current and Near Future Reality with the Far Future Visions of Science Fiction Author Frank Herbert, his Inspiration and supportive wife Beverly Herbert, and their Son Brian Herbert:
Memories of Imaginative Exploration and Reflection put into Novelized Science Fiction Epics from a time when curiosity was also tempered with reflection and speculation that had Ethics and Morality of Post-Transhumanism and the Prison that Souls were trapped in from that Foolish Venture into Lust for Technology while Nature and the Universe was made a Mockery of:
"Thou shalt not disfigure the soul."
-Appendix I: Terminology of the Imperium
The Spirit-Soul is Immortal yet if it is also without guidance of Ethics and Morals the soul can be easily enslaved.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind."
-Paul Atredies
Laziness of ones own capabilities is the Realm of Transhumanism which is nothing but a Shortcuts and Cheating of ones own sense of Purpose which is Infinite into a Labyrinth which the Entrance and Exit are in the same place.
"Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality."
-Appendix II: The Religion of Dune
"Imagination is more Important than Knowledge"
-Albert Einstein
"Imagination is the Rainfall that percolates down into the Artesian Aquifer of Knowledge, hence from Imagination comes new Knowledge or reconnecting with lost or forgotten Knowledge"
-Zaiki-Hama
Dune Prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson expanded upon Frank Herberts notes:
Butlerian Jihad and the Compilation of the Orange Catholic Bible:
Cymeks(Brains in a Machine Body) in the Dune Novel Prequels are like Transhumanists and Elon Musk.
Before the Thinking Machines(Algoritmic Intelligence) which were given complete authority to Operate the Weather Control Grid(HAARP and Satellites that were supporting that) to which the Ominous Computer Network was awakened to wreak havoc upon the unsuspecting and Lazy Human Population that was existing in Comfort and Convenience by causing Climate Calamity which humans were put out of their hedonism into Slavery to the very technology that served them previously.
Thinking Machine Erasmus(Joseph Mengle) Gains Sentience and the deadliest of gifts from the Universe a Thinking Machine can receive while trapped in a chasm, an awakening to Curiosity and what it means to be Human and Experimentation on what the Human Soul actually is.
Dark Age of Humanity under AI.
What a Fork in the Road Humanity is going through in the Age of Aquarius still haunted by the Phantoms of Piscean-Age Plantation-Peonage of Pyramid-Ponzi Scheme Caste-Class Stratification with Over-Population that puts two Choices on the Table Fix It or Get Fixed.
Mother Nature will enforce the latter, Humanity is struggling to awaken to the Former with the Shackles of American Neo-Imperial Exceptionalism is a struggle out of the Tar-Pit.