Accelerated Learning with AI systems?

Posted: April 5th, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence | 1 Comment »

Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers and Geoff Colvin‘s Talent Is Overrated are two recent, popular books that discuss expertise and “what it takes” to become a high performer in particular fields. Both authors touch on is the necessity of at least 10,000 hours of practice. Colvin qualifies it as very particular, deliberate practice. Others agree.

In Accelerated Learning (?) (I have not been able to find a freely available full text version of the article online yet), Robert R. Hoffmann, Paul J. Feltovich, Stephen M. Fiore, Gary Klein and David Ziebell pose a challenge for intelligent systems: Accelerate learning to reduce the time for people to acquire the necessary knowledge and experience to be high performers in their domain.

This strikes me as a fascinating, important application of AI technology. One reason this is important, as indicated by the authors:

Many organizations such as the US Department of Defense, NASA, and the electric utilities are at risk because of the imminent retirement of domain practitioners who handle the most difficult and mission critical challenges.
To accelerate proficiency, we must facilitate the acquisition of extensive, highly organized knowledge. We must also accelerate the acquisition of expert-level reasoning skills and strategies.

and

A classic estimate states that the development of of very high-level skills in any complex domain takes at least 10 years. But extraordinary experts who conduct mission-critical activities in industry settings have proven their value and earned extraordinary respect through the course of 25 to 35 years of experience.

If it takes fairly long to acquire necessary skills and if the qualitative differences between good and great performers is as significant as the research seems to suggest, then the advantages of time reduction become obvious.

I am guessing, approaches would have to support a high degree of personalization. The technology would have to do a very good job at discovering and assessing the user’s skill level as well as determining the best exercises and methods to stretch the user’s mind in just the right way. I am looking forward to learning about interesting projects that address this challenge.

It is intriguing to think about the impact that drastically accelerated acquisition of expert-level skills might have on us as individuals, society, and progress (scientific or otherwise) in general. Certainly, it may affect our ideas of what constitutes complexity in knowledge domains.

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