By: Amber Miller
The New York Times has recently published an article about Paul Allen, Microsoft’s cofounder, who has recently taken up a keen interest in bringing common sense to the realm of AI.“To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense,” said Allen. Many may understand that Artificial Intelligence can respond to things that they are programmed to, however if the answer is not within their programming they can not just think on their feet like humans can. AI has the ability to do a wide variety of things that humans can however the biggest thing that humans take for granted they lack. Paul Allen wants to change this reality, in his attempt to accomplish this he has provided $125 million dollars towards his nonprofit research lab. The research lab will now have double their budget to take on this huge project, it will of course take years to make any sort of progress but they are getting right on it. This however is not Allen’s first attempt to bring common sense to AI. Allen was working with Doug Lenat in the 1980’s, however the project was endless and unsuccessful. Although Allen has failed in the past he is looking towards the future with a fresh look into this challenge. It is intriguing on how so much work is being put into Artificial Intelligence just to make them more “human”, many fear that a lot of these projects will lead to A.I taking over a large amount of human tasks, while leaving humans helpless.
Sources:
“Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.” The New York Times, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/.
Flickr:
GLASS-8, Artificial Intelligence
Cyberculture and Digital Media @ BSU 
I like the topic here! I think common sense in AI is incredibly difficult because a lot of common sense is based off of snap decisions and human logic, as well as context in the situation. Common sense to me is also based off of a human moral system in some cases that AI just don;t have.
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I completely agree. Common sense comes from past experiences that we learn from. It would be incredible to see AI develop something that could harbor a similar process in decision making.
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Common sense comes with experiencing different things and not being created like the AI’s. I imagine these robots to be clueless on so many aspects of life that you really can’t program into something.
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Hi Amber,
I found the idea of robots having common sense intriguing. I understand the skeptics thinking that this is an impossible task due to common sense coming from experience. However the length we’ve been able and will be able to go with technology is unimaginable. Take autonomous vehicles for example. They are creating these vehicles to be able to recognize when a police officer is directing traffic in place of a light, they are having them recognize when it is solar glare and when it is truly a light. The idea of an autonomous vehicle in itself is crazy and to add the intelligence of recognizing multiple outside sources like a human leads me to believe that there will be a way to teach a robot how to think like us with common sense to an extent pulling on information that already is programmed within it!
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