A report from Meghan Neal at Motherboard discusses the work underway at DARPA to develop a machine that can think on its feed, reasoning and problem-solving on the fly, without human intervention. This intelligent real-time computing machine will “focus on mimicking the cerebral neocortex—the part of the brain that’s crucial for things like memory, perception, awareness, and attention,” she writes.
Neal notes that DARPA recently put out a request for information for the research and development of this technology, which it’s calling a “Cortical Processor.” The goal, the article notes, “is to develop a machine that can understand and learn from a huge onslaught of data—including new information that’s streaming in in real-time—from complex environments, like, say, a battlefield. By processing and analyzing all this information in a smart way, the machine could theoretically “decide” an appropriate action to take.”
Says Neal, “According to DARPA, current approaches to artificial intelligence—machine learning techniques like probability and statistics—are too limited and don’t scale to large and complicated datasets. They also aren’t capable of spatial intelligence or comprehending a sense of time—areas DARPA is particularly interested in exploring in its new program.”