Page 64 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

50 Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

reason, and act while taking into account the social, cognitive, and physical
needs of their human teammates. Furthermore, things will often deal with
humans who are experiencing extreme physical and cognitive stress, and
may therefore behave differently from what can be assumed from observing
humans under more benign conditions.
An intelligent thing will need to deal with a world of astonishing com-
plexity. The sheer number and diversity of things and humans within the
IoBT will be enormous. For example, the number of connected things
within a future army brigade is likely to be several orders of magnitude
greater than in current practice, and this is just the beginning. Consider that
intelligent things belonging to such a brigade will inevitably interact—
willingly or unwillingly—with things owned and operated by other parties,
such as those of the adversary, or of the surrounding civilian population. If
the brigade operates in a large city where each apartment building can con-
tains thousands of things, the overall universe of connected things grows dra-
matically. Millions of things per square kilometer is not an unreasonable
expectation (Fig. 3.2).
The above scenario also points to a great diversity of things within the
overall environment of the battlefield. Things will come from different man-
ufacturers; have different designs, capabilities, and purposes; be configured
or machine-learned differently, etc. No individual thing will be able to use
preconceived (preprogrammed, prelearned, etc.) assumptions about the
behaviors or performance of other things it meets on the battlefield. Instead,
behaviors and characteristics will have to be learned and updated autono-
mously and dynamically during the operations. This includes humans
(yes, humans are a species of things, in a way) and therefore the behaviors
and intents of humans, such as friendly warfighters, adversaries, civilians,
and so on, will have to be continually learned and inferred.
The cognitive processes of both things and humans will be severely chal-
lenged in this environment of voluminous and heterogeneous information.
Rather than the communications bandwidth, the cognitive bandwidth may
become the most severe constraint. Both humans and things seek informa-
tion that is well-formed, reasonably sized, essential in nature, and highly rel-
evant to their current situation and mission. Unless information is useful, it
does more harm than good. The trustworthiness of the information and the
value of information arriving from different sources (especially other things)
will be highly variable and generally uncertain. For any given intelligent
thing, the incoming information could contain mistakes, erroneous obser-
vations or conclusions made by other things, or intentional distortions