I Think, Therefore I Am - Sorta
From: LA Weekly - 07/28/2005
By: Margaret Wertheim

PsychSim, a virtual reality artificial intelligence technology, is helping
train the U.S. military as it crafts real-life scenarios and thrusts its
trainees in the middle of them, forcing them to interact with simulations,
known as agents, endowed with human intelligence. Stacy Marsella, one of the
PsychSim's chief architects and a project leader at USC's Information
Sciences Institute, envisions an expansive role for AI-powered agents in the
future, claiming that, over time, they will become an integral part of our
world and be able to interact seamlessly with humans on a complex level.
Marsella is also involved in an agent-based project in which a virtual
therapist counsels parents of children with cancer and simulations that could
treat people afflicted with phobias and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, both
exploring the potential to create human thoughts and emotions through
technology. Marsella says virtual minds obtain cognitive powers by
anticipating the actions of other simulations and planning responses.
PsychSim capitalizes on technology designed for non-human purposes, such as
the software that powers the Mars rovers, and seeks to infuse it with a human
dimension to enable more advanced modeling. The central departure in AI has
been the attempt to simulate the non-rational components of thought,
principally emotion and psychology. In creating an agent, programmers need to
give it goals, such as adhering to social norms, or being polite and liked;
and then they need to instill in it the ability to carry on a conversation in
a manner coherent with human standards, where the most basic decisions of how
to respond to a simple question or statement become challenging. The military
is funding Marsella's research as part of a broad program to prepare soldiers
for deployment in Iraq by teaching them rudimentary Arabic and simulating
command situations. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/35/quark-wertheim.php

Links:
Stacy Marsella
http://www.isi.edu/~marsella/

"Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic, and More"
http://www.tacticallanguage.com/tacticaliraqi/press-nytimes-2004-07-06.htm

Information Sciences Institute
http://www.isi.edu/