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The US Military Wants To Teach AI Some Basic Common Sense (technologyreview.com)
DARPA, the research arm of the U.S. military, has a new Machine Common Sense (MCS) program that will run a competition that asks AI algorithms to make sense of questions with common sense answers. For example, here's one of the questions: "A student puts two identical plants in the same type and amount of soil. She gives them the same amount of water. She puts one of these plants near a window and the other in a dark room. The plant near the window will produce more (A) oxygen (B) carbon dioxide (C) water." MIT Technology Review reports: A computer program needs some understanding of the way photosynthesis works in order to tackle the question. Simply feeding a machine lots of previous questions won't solve the problem reliably. These benchmarks will focus on language because it can so easily trip machines up, and because it makes testing relatively straightforward. Etzioni says the questions offer a way to measure progress toward common-sense understanding, which will be crucial. [...] Previous attempts to help machines understand the world have focused on building large knowledge databases by hand. This is an unwieldy and essentially never-ending task. The most famous such effort is Cyc, a project that has been in the works for decades. "The absence of common sense prevents an intelligent system from understanding its world, communicating naturally with people, behaving reasonably in unforeseen situations, and learning from new experiences,"https://www.darpa.mil/ Dave Gunning, a program manager at DARPA, said in a statement issued this morning. "This absence is perhaps the most significant barrier between the narrowly focused AI applications we have today and the more general AI applications we would like to create in the future."
Good luck with that.
Common sense isn't very common I'm afraid.
That doesn't sound like common sense... Imagine an adult that had dropped out of school at a young age... they may not be able to answer the given question. Knowing that plants produce oxygen is something learned. I would put common sense more in the realm of: if you spit in someone's face, will they: a) hug you, b) get angry, c) eat a sandwich? Common sense is sense acquired through common experience, not schooling.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
...for the last 30 years. Nobody has cracked it yet. This "common sense" bit is what prevents "true" AI from becoming a reality. What we have now are glorified expert systems and pattern matching algorithms.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.