DARPA's Lifetime Learning Project Will Let A.I. Grow Up Like a Child

DARPA is working on a new machine learning technology that could let a future artificial intelligence grow up, learning from its experiences over the entirety of its unnatural life. Essentially, DARPA wants to turn every interaction the A.I. has into an opportunity to collect data. The Lifetime Learning Machines (L2M) initiative's goal wouldn't be surveillance, though that's certainly a concern, but rather improving artificial intelligence by exposing it to new data and experiences and letting it learn from them -- just like a biological brain. The project's leaders call this a "new computing paradigm" that could supplant classical A.I. coding, in which knowledge and behaviors must all be specified in advance. Though the four-year program to let A.I.s become "responsive and adaptive collaborators" with humans is still just getting started, the machine learning goals for its contributors are clear: to allow A.I.s to learn from incidental experiences.