Air War in 2050 – Air Force Research Lab Commander on Artificial Intelligence

Video Above: Air War in 2050 – Air Force Research Lab Commander

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

The (now former) Commanding General of the Air Force Research Lab is already thinking about the next-generation of AI as something which could progressively move beyond pure data-base comparisons and do more real-time learning and help analyze more subjective phenomena unique to human cognition.

Artificial Intelligence – AI

“AI today is very database intensive. But what can and should it be in the future? How can we graduate it from just being a database to something that can leverage concepts and relationships, or emotions and predictive analyses? And so there’s so much more that we as humans can do that AI cannot? How do we get to that?,” Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, Commanding General of the Air Force Research Lab, told Warrior in an interview.

Pringle’s thinking does appear closely aligned with cutting edge AI-focused research which is indeed focused on ways to catalog, discern, interpret, organize and ultimately analyze things typically more difficult for mathematically-driven machines to understand. 

For example, as Pringle said, what about emotion? Certain subjective or more nuanced and varied concepts? Is there a way these kinds of cognitive phenomena could be accurately tracked by computers? Certainly would seem difficult, as an interwoven blend of emotional, philosophical and even psychological variables could all inform human behavior and human perceptions. 

Nonetheless, Pringle does appear to be referring to areas of great promise, such as the emerging ability of AI to determine context and, for instance, understand the difference between foot “ball” and dance “ball” by analyzing surrounding words. This kind of machine learning represents the cutting edge or new boundary for AI, which Pringle explained is not without challenges. There is some early military and industry progress underway along these lines, as things like previous behavior patterns, philosophical concepts or speech patterns, for instance, can be cataloged and potentially analyzed to predict solutions.