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The US Military Wants To Teach AI Some Basic Common Sense (technologyreview.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the easier-said-than-done dept.

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."

17 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Teach AI Some Basic Common Sense by nospam007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Good luck with that.
    Common sense isn't very common I'm afraid.

    1. Re:Teach AI Some Basic Common Sense by Aighearach · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, even in the attempted example question, the "common sense" answer is A, but the "actual fact" answer is A and B. A during the day, B at night. C is most likely also true in real scenarios.

      My goal in writing automated systems is to make less of the mistakes known by the moniker "common sense," not to make more of them.

      If you lack information and are forced into action, "common sense" might be a decent least-bad semi-random choice, but it should never be expected to be correct or optimal.

    2. Re:Teach AI Some Basic Common Sense by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 2

      Actually its much easier than you think.

      Common sense in machine learning is accomplished using a Gaussian distribution (bell curve). You can even do it in databases using standard deviation functions.

      --
      Greed is the root of all evil.
  2. That doesn't sound like common sense by Lab+Rat+Jason · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:That doesn't sound like common sense by bugs2squash · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I always thought that a reasonable definition of common sense was the set of rules you fall back on when you don't have sufficient specific knowledge to address the issue at hand. For example, you may not specifically know how to repair your car, so common sense tells you to seek help from someone more qualified.

      As you say, there is no common sense that can be applied to plants and sunlight, you either know about the process or you don't. A system applying common sense would defer to a botanist or refer to some reference material to improve its skillset or some other such thing

      Now that's not to say that you can't infer from other data that perhaps it takes more energy to produce O2 than C02 and guess that the light might be such an energy source but at this point you're falling back on specialist knowledge that it either has or it lacks

      --
      Nullius in verba
    2. Re:That doesn't sound like common sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      (e) Develop a taste for human saliva, causing it to enslave all humans and farm them for saliva.

    3. Re:That doesn't sound like common sense by Shaitan · · Score: 2

      "For example, you may not specifically know how to repair your car, so common sense tells you to seek help from someone more qualified."

      That is in no small part what separates genuine intelligence from mediocrity. The mediocre seek the most qualified to provide them answers, the exceptional constantly strive to improve their qualification. Not just about cars, about everything. Only then do you become qualified to judge the qualification of another who you might delegate the actual labor to.

  3. They've been trying to... by JBMcB · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.
    1. Re:They've been trying to... by gweihir · · Score: 2

      Looks very much like anything requiring insight is not accessible to computing machinery. For anybody with some understanding of the problem, that is no surprise. It is highly doubtful insight and intelligence can actually work without self-awareness and free will (yes, I know some neuro-morons claim their faulty experiments show there is no such thing), as that is the only place were we observe it.

      Sure, physicalists (basically a fundamentalist cult) claim that everything is physical, and hence strong AI should be possible, but that is belief, not science. They consistently fail to explain consciousness except by calling it magic (in other words), for example. There is also the little problem that they think they can get intelligence and insight without free will. There is no indication that is even possible, and there certainly is no example of that in nature.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re:They've been trying to... by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, that happened. Bots now routinely pass that test.

      It has not. What has happened is that bots can successfully claim to be some limited form of human being (very young and/or with serious mental defects) in a very restricted topic area and a very time-limited conversation. The general Turing test is unsolved.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:They've been trying to... by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      30 years ago, we thought that if a machine could pass the Turing test we'd call it intelligent. Well, that happened. Bots now routinely pass that test.

      Bots don't pass the Turing test. Every time that happens, look at the details and you'll see that the experiment is done poorly. One common technique is to have the tester guess whether they are talking to a human or a computer: but the human uses limited responses, acting somewhat like a computer.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:They've been trying to... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      Machines aren't intelligent. Look at humans: the brain is a neural network, and human memory is physically a hopfield with associative references (and yes, an artificial neural network has the same problem with easily storing things but then not being able to find them again later--with the same solution being that it's easier to recall things if you activate more neurons, so artificial neural networks can better remember things by using mind palaces, pegs, and simple rumination to reflect on how things are analogically similar to other things).

      The entire machine works by rolling billions of dice and loading the dice to increase the repeatability of good outcomes.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
  4. The Noisy End by decipher_saint · · Score: 2

    Aim the noisy end away from face (or whatever the AI equivalent is)

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
    1. Re:The Noisy End by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      Generalized to AI it would be, "aim the energetic end towards negative infinity on the friend axis."

      But for contemporary electronic machines a better simplification might be just to measure (predicted) heat, and aim the hot end towards -1

  5. The interesting thing about this article title by hey! · · Score: 2

    ... is that it could plausibly have been picked out from tech news headlines from 35 years ago, when I was in school. And I wouldn't be the least surprised if it crops up again 35 years from now.

    The rich contextual knowledge humans have of the world has been the the clear advantage we have over software ever since AI researchers were doing the digital equivalent of banging rocks together. I remember being awed by SHRDLU's ability to interact with people so long as you pared all context away and you restricted yourself to an artificial, constructed world.

    Logic, after all, is only good as the propositions you feed it. The illogic of human reasoning is both our Achilles' heel and our greatest strength. Our familiarity with the world makes us reject conclusions which are logically valid, but just seem wrong. This is often wrong, and when it is we call it a "cognitive bias". But it's often right, too, and when it is we call it "common sense". Same mechanism, different words.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    1. Re:The interesting thing about this article title by Shaitan · · Score: 2

      The problem now isn't that we can't build a generalist AI, the problem is that it is difficult to measure the success of an implementation since you are no longer defining it's goals and a generalist AI of high complexity will not necessarily rapidly show consistency and progress on logic tasks. Even the brain of a child has immense raw processing power but it takes a great deal of time to train basic addition. We are testing our AI's with dramatically less processing power and looking for them to solve basic addition within a few short iterations as a primitive test to show they can learn at all.

      The problem with a generalist AI is that you have to let go of control and if you let go of control how do you ensure the AI will choose to pay attention to your input and motivations to develop into something you can communicate with?

  6. CyC ? by Tom · · Score: 2

    Didn't we already have this 30 years ago? It was called CyC, a program of the U of Texas, if I recall correctly, and it had exactly this goal, except that they called it "general background knowledge" and not "common sense".

    As I recall, the software eventually could read and understand newspaper articles, but didn't progress beyond the understanding of a pre-teen child.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org