AP PHOTO/MICHAEL SCHMELLING
SIRI
RISING
Learns) program, funded by the
Defense Department’s investment
arm, DARPA.
At least to some people, it
seemed as if the serious-minded
federal government was taking
a flier on the stuff of 9-year-old
boys’ sci-fi fantasies.
“CALO was put together at a
time when many people said AI
was a waste of time,” explains
Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and associate professor at
Stanford University. “It had failed
multiple times, skepticism was
high and a lot of people thought it
was a dumb idea.”
Despite its naysayers, CALO
proved a scientific triumph. The
project reunited, for the first time
in decades, independent disciplines of artificial intelligence
that had been deemed too complex to cooperate.
It also demonstrated that a
machine could learn in real time
through its lived experience, as
a human being does. Previously,
artificial intelligence software had
been coached “in vitro,” meaning a machine-learning algorithm
would be applied to a fixed set
of data, then judged on how it
handled that information. Every part of CALO instead had to
HUFFINGTON
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lear