A New "Common Sense" Test For AI Could Result in More Intelligent Machines

Today’s AI systems quickly evolve to become humans' new best friends. AIs can concoct award-winning whiskey, write poetry, and help doctors perform extremely precise surgical operations.

FREMONT, CA: AI systems of today are swiftly growing to replace humans as our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of creating poetry, award-winning whiskey, and assisting surgeons during incredibly precise surgical procedures. However, there is one thing they are unable to accomplish, even though it appears to be much simpler than all the others: employ common sense.

In contrast to intelligence, common sense is something that most people possess naturally and innately that helps them get by daily life. It is something that cannot truly be taught. G. K. Chesterton, a philosopher, stated in 1906 that common sense is a wild thing, barbarian, and beyond rules. Therefore, robots cannot yet employ common sense. But contemporary research in the area has enabled humanity to measure an AI's fundamental capacity for psychological thinking, moving one step closer.

In the end, common sense will improve AI's ability to assist people in resolving problems in the real world. Numerous people contend that AI-driven solutions for complicated problems, such as identifying Covid-19 therapies, frequently fall short since the system can't easily adjust to a setting in the real world when the problems are unpredictable, ambiguous, and not predefined by rules.

Better customer service, where a robot can genuinely help a dissatisfied customer instead of sending them into an infinite choice from the following options loop, could result from injecting common sense into AI. It can help autonomous vehicles respond more effectively to unforeseen roadside incidents. It can even assist the military in gathering intelligence that could save a person's life.

Common sense, also referred to as the black matter of AI, is essential to the development of AI. Giving computers Common Sense has always been an aim of computer science; in 1958, the field's founder John McCarthy,  titled Programs with Common Sense examined how logic may be utilised as a means of information representation in computer memory.

In addition to social skills and logic, common sense also includes a naive sense of physics, the understanding of some physical principles without the need to solve physics equations, such as why a bowling ball shouldn't be placed on a sloping surface. It also involves a foundational understanding of abstract concepts like time and location, which enables them to organise, estimate, and plan. This indicates that common sense is not a single precise concept, making it difficult to define by rules.