SoylentNews

owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested some of its resources into a robot that’s been trained—likely among other things—to identify humans. There’s just one little problem: The robot is cartoonishly easy to confuse.

Army veteran, former Pentagon policy analyst, and author Paul Scharre is gearing up to release a new book called Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Despite the fact that the book isn’t scheduled to hit shelves until Feb. 28, Twitter users are already sharing excerpts via social media. This includes The Economist‘s defense editor, Shashank Joshi, who shared a particularly laughable passage on Twitter.

In the excerpt, Scharre describes a week during which DARPA calibrated its robot’s human recognition algorithm alongside a group of US Marines. The Marines and a team of DARPA engineers spent six days walking around the robot, training it to identify the moving human form. On the seventh day, the engineers placed the robot at the center of a traffic circle and devised a little game: The Marines had to approach the robot from a distance and touch the robot without being detected.

Original Submission