DARPA Seeking AI That Learns All the Time

Earlier this month a self-driving shuttle in Las Vegas patiently waited as a delivery truck backed up, then backed up some more, then backed right into it. Inconveniently for the roboshuttle's developer Navya, this happened within hours of the shuttle's inauguration ceremony. The real problem is that the shuttle can't learn from the incident the way a human would: immediately and without forgetting how to do everything else in the process. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking to change the way AI works through a program it calls L2M, or Lifelong Learning Machines. The agency is looking for systems that learn continuously, adapt to new tasks, and know what to learn and when.