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In the second White Paper on Symbiotic Autonomous Systems, that is now in the drafting stage, I am looking at the area of Awareness technologies and I am looking forward to get your feedback.
The growing availability of sensors and machine intelligence is creating an ambient more and more aware of what is going on, of why, and able to forecast what might the evolution be (forecasting). These three characteristics, what is happening – why it is happening – what might happen, are the basic components of what we call intelligence, a feature that we find, in different degrees, in animal life. This is the result of an evolution process that stems from the advantage deriving from possessing it, making those species that casually acquired it to take the edge on those that didn’t. Notice that this advantage becomes true, and then influences the selection process (leading to evolution) if it results in acting in an advantageous way out of a slate of possible actions. Plants are missing, to a large extent, the possibility of acting differently, hence we have not seen intelligence evolving in plants (plants can evolve different strategies but the reaction time to changes in the ambient is “slow”; rocks, one might argue, also react to changes in their environment but the reaction time is even longer, hence does not qualify to our definition of “intelligence”).
Technologies to create awareness, take decision –evaluating the whys is a fundamental component- evaluating the outcome of a decision, and implementing the decision are now available and are becoming embedded in more and more artefacts and globally in several ambient. An integral part of “intelligence” is autonomy (at least in the evaluation!).
Awareness requires, in many situations, the capability to recognize the “intention” of other players (life and artefacts alike) operating in the same ambient. This is essential both in understanding the why and in studying evolution scenarios.
More recently technologies have been experimented to go beyond the intention recognition to look into the motivations of different players, the sentiment analyses. Let’s take a look at each area.
