From today's New York Times story "The Right and Wrong Stuff of Thinking Outside the Box":
Another project that is seeking researchers is Lifelog. As Darpa conceives it, Lifelog would use elaborate sensors, cameras and databanks to record and digest virtually every experience of a human subject � from his physical state, to all his activity, including the tedium of everyday life. Eventually, advocates say, Lifelog will allow scientists to build humanoid robots that can solve problems based on experience, or provide instant and total recall of how a situation, or a battlefield, has changed. The aim is for robots to become the ultimate personal assistants.
That's an exciting use for LifeLog. Robot secretaries! If you take a look at some of the literature on the proposal, though, you'll see that LifeLog has other potential applications:
The Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting proposals to develop an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person�s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this "LifeLog" concept is to be able to trace the "threads" of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships.
Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels. GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors capture the user�s orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors capture the user�s physical state. LifeLog also captures the user�s computer-based interactions and transactions throughout the day from email, calendar, instant messaging, web-based transactions, as well as other common computer applications, and stores the data (or, in some cases, pointers to the data) in appropriate formats. Voice transactions can be captured through recording of telephone calls and voice mail, with the called and calling numbers as metadata. FAX and hardcopy written material (such as postal mail) can be scanned. Finally, LifeLog also captures (or at least captures pointers to) the tremendous amounts of context data the user is exposed to every day from diverse media sources, including broadcast television and radio, hardcopy newspapers, magazines, books and other documents, and softcopy electronic books, web sites, and database access.
By using a search engine interface, the user can easily retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier in as much detail as is desired, including imagery, audio, or video replay of the event.
Forget the robot secretaries and multimedia cognitive modeling: LifeLog is a pie-in-the-sky surveillance system, a twisted offshoot of the scrapped T(otal)errorist Information Awareness program. Take a look at this article in Wired, or this one in the Washington Times. Somehow, though, the New York Times sees fit to print a milk-mild mention of the most invasive sounding spy technology ever squirted out of a sleeping John Ashcroft.
STUPID COMPUTER! MAKE SOME TOAST!
Fortunately for all of us in North America, though, the same article quotes "Darpa experts" expressing the following:
For all the progress in processing information, Darpa experts say, computers are still unable to learn, explain their reasoning or fix themselves.
Ronald Brachman, a Darpa expert in artificial intelligence, said it was time to view computers in a dramatically different way. He expressed annoyance at his "stupid PC," which cannot, in any real sense, learn.
"If you look at some of the behaviors of today's machines that just perform rote tasks � their failure to learn and adapt, and their failure see things that are obvious and important to humans � you see that they do things that in humans would clearly be taken to be severely unintelligent," Mr. Brachman said.
Brachman then ordered his iMac to fetch his shoes. Nothing happened. He beat it mercilessly with his belt. The iMac either cowered in place or just stayed put (it was hard to tell). "Stupid piece of obsolete garbage!" Brachman screamed. "I blew my vacation pay on you!" Tears streamed down his face.
