It seems US Army loves to live in the world of fantasies! Inspired by the fictitious “Terminator” and then perhaps illusioning their capabilities, army guys seem to have gone desperate to engineer artificially intelligent Terminator. This ironical “resolve” of the army has come forward in the form of an official document entitled “psychologically inspired object recognition system” and vows to build the same. This means army wants to build intelligent robots that could “identify” objects at present; perhaps “knowing” how to use them and “deciding” when to use them being the next stages. The document also plans to accomplish the project in three phases!

This document, though official, is perhaps the work of chaps who aren’t even slightly aware of the even the basics of robotics; forget the current state of this technology. Across the world, researchers have been toiling hard from the past two decades to artificially mimic the human thought and decision making process. To illustrate with an example just remember the Terminator, armed with a gun and chasing the girl on his motorbike.

To realise the scenario in the real world with something close to Terminator, the robot has to uniquely “identify” the gun, the departing girl, her pace, her body-language and then to “decide” whether to mount itself on the bike. And this thought process needs to be done in fraction of a second with an accuracy of almost hundred percent. This thought process will have to consult it’s “inbuilt” database about the brands of the gun, bike and will use algorithms to decide what needs to be done; performing the mechanical motion being another daunting task. And it is at this point where the problem lies! Algorithm one may conclude the gun to be a killing machine whereas the second may conclude it to be a wall-drilling machine!

Recent researches suggest that biologically humans conclude by taking into account several permutations and combinations of geometry, face recognition, context and the domain space. Infinite number of scenarios and situations in real lives can never be tackled by set of a few “algorithms”. So it’s better suggested that army give up their dream of the “Terminator”, at least for the near future!

Source: Wired