SummuryIncreasingly diverse and complex computer-based support underlies critical human processes, such as education, commerce, medicine, science, defense, and government. These systems are fed massive amounts of data and due to the complexity and size of these systems, they are integrating and interfacing with each other with less human oversight. Soon, they will need to build, refine, and elaborate their own models and processes, making more decisions about what information to use in what manner and how to approach problems or goals. Hence, these systems must be able to reason about and report out to us their modeling and processing choices in order to help us monitor and control their operations and interactions. In this paper, we discuss our work on creating reflective systems, and how reflection coupled with “generative processes” and “cognitive instrumentation” will help enable organic computing systems. We then briefly describe our testbed for studying self-conscious modeling.
Thermodynamic Computing: An Intellectual and Technological Frontier