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US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Artificial Intelligence to Man Air Traffic Control



I would be remiss if I didn’t start this article out preaching some sort of dire warnings about the threat of artificial intelligence and robotic overlords.

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And when you hear of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) creating an AI that can run air traffic control stations, you begin to wonder how wise it is letting DARPA have any money whatsoever. Thankfully, it isn’t as scary as it sounds – although, the simple fact is, DARPA produces technologies that almost always filter through in to the mainstream. For the moment however, the DARPA research is concentrating on providing assistance to US Military Air Fields with an AI that will help automate some procedures. The Generalized Integrated Learning Architecture (GILA) is intended to supplement and probably eventually takeover human controls to manage the load of increased air traffic, unmanned vehicles and other airborne weapons. Currently, air control centers use what is known as Airspace Control Orders, which provide guidance in the use of messages intended to communicate airspace control information among locations. Naturally, commands that are read incorrectly or are that provide unclear instructions can cause a lot of trouble, and possible harm to passengers, pilots and people on the ground. The GILA project – being developed by Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories – is intent on learning flight controllers’ tasks by example so that in the future they can create and control these orders. Naturally providing a massive computer with computing power and speed well above what a human can produce will be a benefit. According to DARPA, GILA will learn by constructing its knowledge base from different sources, including generating knowledge by its own reasoning. According to a Military & Aerospace item, such software has to combine limited observations with subject expertise, general knowledge, reasoning, and by asking what-if questions. "Eventually [GILA] will outperform the novice human planner by 125% while giving the inexperienced user an embedded, accelerated training capability," says Lockheed.   Without trying to draw corollary lines between GILA and SkyNet, from the popular Terminator series, and thus showing us our own doom, this will hopefully help in the long run. And all my joking aside there better be someone out there who is monitoring all these robotic and AI developments so that we do not end up with a cataclysmic apocalyptic future. Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.


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Guest Column Joshua Hill -- Bio and Archives

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