DARPA's latest magic-tech project, "An Enduring, Personalized, Cognitive Assistant," may not be as creepy as Total Information Awareness, but it sure is silly.
…will be set in an office context and will act like a personal executive assistant to a modern knowledge-worker or decision-maker. The Assistant should demonstrate a number of key capabilities: continuous learning over significant periods of time (months, if not years), and the ability to survive "injury," intermediate failure and even complete shutdown, whether intentional or inadvertent; this includes the retention of information and skills through system failure and shutdown (Enduring); the capability of autonomous as well as supervised learning, including learning by observing a partner or by being told something directly (at any natural level of abstraction) (Personalized); the capability to have and use domain and task knowledge; the capacity to be aware of events as they transpire and of the Assistant's own place in the world; the ability to have and remember experiences of its own, and to integrate perceptual input with longer-term knowledge; the ability to explain its reasoning and behavior in natural terms to its partner; and the ability to decide what to do and to act in real time (Cognitive); the capability of cooperating in a team or multi-agent situation; the capacity to interact in a multi-modal, broad spectrum way with humans (including natural language); the ability to be available everywhere; and the capacity to develop the degree of trust necessary for successful everyday interaction with a human partner (Assistant).
(Thanks, Dave!)
