As an artificial intelligence researcher, my work is part of a broad effort to give computers a semblance of common sense. It’s an extremely challenging effort. In reality, in accomplishing these feats, humans are relying on not one but a powerful set of universal abilities known as common sense
Quick – define common sense
Modern definitions today agree that, at minimum, it is a natural, rather than formally taught, human ability that allows people to navigate daily life.
- Common sense is unusually broad and includes not only social abilities, like managing expectations and reasoning about other people’s emotions but also a naive sense of physics, such as knowing that a heavy rock cannot be safely placed on a flimsy plastic table.
- Naive because people know such things despite not consciously working through physics equations.
Recognizing AI common sense
Even if you accept that some overlap and ambiguity in theories of common sense is inevitable, can researchers ever really be sure that an AI has common sense?
- People employ a range of skills, honed by evolution, including the ability to recognize basic cause and effect, creative problem solving, estimations, planning and essential social skills, such as conversation and negotiation.
- An AI should achieve no less before its creators can declare victory in machine commonsense research.
Common sense is hard to compute
Despite enormous advances in AI, especially in game-playing and computer vision, machine common sense with the richness of human common sense remains a distant possibility.
- This may be why AI efforts designed for complex, real-world problems with many intertwining parts such as diagnosing and recommending treatments for COVID-19 patients, sometimes fall flat.
Transformers to the rescue?
Recently, a type of advanced deep learning AI called transformers have been used to model natural language in a powerful way and, with some adjustments, are able to answer simple commonsense questions.
- This has forced researchers in the field to face two related questions at the edge of science and philosophy
- Just what is common sense and how can we be sure an AI has common sense?
