They really are trying to control the world through grammar!
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/darpa-wants-a-new-language-to-explain-everything/
QuoteDarpa has a well-earned rep for some of the most ambitious, over-the-top research programs of all time. But this might be the most over-the-toppest of all. The very first step? Create a unified mathematical language for everything the military sees or hears.
The armed forces are overwhelmed by all the data its various sensors are sniffing out. They want a singe data stream that combines drone video feeds, cell phone intercepts, and targeting radar. Darpa's solution, found in the brand-new Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation, and Execution program is to design an algorithm that teaches the sensors how to interpret the world — how to think, how to learn and what data, accordingly to collect.
Sensors "process their signals as if they were seeing the world anew at every instant," Darpa laments in its call for algorithms. To put it in Philosophy 101 terms, existence is, to a sensor, what William James called a "blooming, buzzing confusion": an unmediated series of events to be vacuumed up, leaving an analyst overloaded with unsorted data. Wouldn't it be better if a sensor could be taught how to filter the world through a perceptual prism, anticipating what the analyst needs to know?
That's the specific military application of MSEE. But to get there, Darpa take a rather unconventional path. To get the "economy and efficiency that derives from an intrinsic, objective-driven unification of sensing and exploitation," it wants to create an "intrinsically integrated" algorithm for the machines to interpret reality. "All proposed research must describe a unifying mathematical formalism that incorporates stochasticity fundamentally," Darpa tells would-be designers.
In other words, one mathematical formula has to teach machines how to create order out of the chaos of the world around them, and to use that common ontology to develop a "learning capacity and expected rate-of-learning." Naturally, human interaction is to be limited: the sensors should "learn in unsupervised or semi-supervised fashion" instead.
"Specifically excluded is research that results primarily in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice," Darpa writes. You think? It even italicizes that passage in its bid. If you're going to teach an infrared sensor pod how to make sense of the shapes it observes, there's no half-stepping allowed.
So basically DARPA want a new language which will allow its killer robots to understand everything.
I see no problems here.
This is how Skynet starts. Kill it with fire.
Reminds me more of Portal
Eta
http://youtu.be/Fz2_NkyTv8E
Surely there wont be enough money for contractors now that the military budget has been cut :fnord:
Quote from: Joh'Nyx on January 11, 2011, 11:04:55 PM
Surely there wont be enough money for contractors now that the military budget has been cut :fnord:
BWAHAHA. Killer robots that can communicate mass sensory data are more important than veterans' benefits.
If they succeed, that is actually really frightening.
Haha! I know one of the people who is working on this. He's smarter than all of us put together and sees no inherent problem with making self-aware killer robots.
You guys are screwed.
Quote from: East Coast Hipster on January 12, 2011, 03:01:33 PM
Haha! I know one of the people who is working on this. He's smarter than all of us put together and sees no inherent problem with making self-aware killer robots.
You guys are screwed.
If that is the case then I have reason to doubt his intelligence.
Intelligence =/= morality
This just in:
The Military is switching to MIDI.
MIDIJUNKIES!!!! GONNA FUCK YOU UP!!
Quote from: Cain on January 12, 2011, 03:20:29 PM
Intelligence =/= morality
Lets make that a quick reminder that serial killers are generally smarter than average.
As indeed are terrorists.
And SCIENTISTS who are down for ANY PROGRAM and know how to MAKE IT HAPPEN.