The mad geniuses at DARPA have their next project lined up: a camera that can guide itself and report back from the field. That kind of visual intelligence has been an exclusively human trait, until now.
The plan, called “The Mind’s Eye,” is going to be outlined next at a one-day conference in DC in late April. The hope is to make up for human weaknesses, like fatigue or bias, that can result in unreliable intelligence. These cameras will be endowed with both the intellect to process a scene and the imagination to contextualize and describe it.
It’s a reminder, also, that even those events that we capture on video are prone to memory bias. We choose where we point the camera and where we don’t. When we narrate, we often say what we think we’ll want to hear later instead of what we’re actually thinking and feeling. A cognitive camera couldn’t care less. It couldn’t care at all.
Aside from being incredibly cool, if successful these Mind’s Eye cameras would keep soldiers and advance scouts out of harm’s way. If it seems like science fiction, that’s because it is—for now. But on April 20th we’ll find out just how close we are to it being science fact. [Wired Danger Room]
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
