Friday Fiction Facts: Software Will Read Your Mind or What Did You Just Think, You Silly Customer?
February 28, 2020
Machines that can read a person’s thoughts and predict that individual’s actions has inspired many science fiction and fantasy fans, but technology has yet to become a rock solid reality like Captain Kirk’s communications device. Technology might have finally advanced enough to realize this idea says “New Software Agents Will Infer What Users Are Thinking.”
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is heading a DARPA project that will examine how AI can be designed to predict human thoughts. Katia Sycara from CMU’s Robotics Institute will lead the project (budgeted at $6.6 million) sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Neuroscientists and human factors expert from Northrop Grumman and the University of Pittsburgh will also work on the project.
The project’s aim is to see how machine social intelligence can help human/machine teams safety, efficiently, and productively work together. Sycara and her team hope to teach machines how to infer human behavior. Humans innately have this skill, but machines have a long way to go:
“Humans have the ability to infer the mental states of others, called theory of mind — something people do as part of situational awareness while evaluating their environment and considering possible actions. AI systems aren’t yet capable of this skill, but Sycara and her colleagues expect to achieve this through meta-learning, a branch of machine learning in which the software agent essentially learns how to learn….The research team will test their socially intelligent agents in a search-and-rescue scenario within the virtual world of the Minecraft video game, in a testbed developed with researchers at Arizona State University. In the first year, the researchers will focus on training their software agent to infer the state of mind of an individual team member. In subsequent years, the agent will interact with multiple human players and attempt to understand what each of them is thinking, even as their virtual environment changes.”
The project’s research focuses on software agents or digital assistants, which exist. Just try a smart customer support service. These are are limited in their actions and their intelligence. More autonomous, intelligent programs can work on complex tasks with their human partners. Self driving cars, like the Tesla, already use software agents as do pop up advertisements. The range of tasks software agents can do is endless, but some will be more beneficial to humans than others.
Mind reading? Venture capitalists, open your check books.
Whitney Grace, February 28, 2020
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