Stanford Seminar - Universal Intelligent Systems by 2030 - Carl Hewitt and John Perry

Carl Hewitt of MIT and John Perry of Stanford discuss Universal Intelligent Systems.

This talk was given on January 5, 2022.

Universal Intelligent Systems (UIS) will encompass everything manufactured and every sensed activity. Every device used at home and work will be included as well as all equipment used in recreation, entertainment, socializing, and relaxation including clothing, accessories and shoes.

Information will be integrated from massive pervasively inconsistent information from video, Web pages, hologlasses (electronic glasses with holographic-like overlays), online data bases, sensors, articles, human speech and gestures, etc. Information integration will enable an intelligent system to be used by other intelligent systems without having to start over from scratch. Information inference will be robust taking into account multiple sources and perspectives and counterbalancing many interests and perspectives. UIS will largely overcome the current reuse pain point that there is no effective inference for information that is balkanized in applications. An Intelligent System will be educable so that it can interactively adapt in real time (instead of relying exclusively on passively attempting to find correlations among inputs.

An Intelligent System will be self-informative in the sense of knowing its own goals, plans, history, provenance of its information. Also, it will have relevant information about its own capabilities including strengths and weaknesses. When overload or other internal trouble is inferred, an Intelligent System will be able to reach out as appropriate to people and other systems.

Security will be paramount for an Intelligent System so that it is not easy to penetrate or to deceive into taking inappropriate action.

Project Liftoff(TM) to develop and deploy UIS in this decade stands to be a huge development effort comparable to the Apollo Project. Education will be crucial to the success of Project Liftoff because there is an enormous talent shortage.