2020 Hindsight: Systems Need to Determine Whether or Not They Did Their Best

The purpose of this position paper is to present the need for hindsight in SISSY systems and to suggest some initial starting points to incorporate these challenging capabilities into our systems. After discussing the characteristics of human hindsight, as seen in After Action Reviews, reflection in education, and “lessons learned” activities in corporations, we present what we believe are three doable steps towards incorporating hindsight into SISSY systems. First we discuss the need to develop systems that can reason about “situations” and then describe how this folds into the management of uncertainty and identifying knowledge gaps. We second briefly summarize the implications of hindsight for uncertainty management, especially drawing on the strategies that intelligent animals do in regards to unknown environments and how that leads to some of the products we want to produce when adding hindsight to a SISSY system. Lastly we discuss how hindsight requires new types of social processes and what types of information will be important for systems to share.