Artificial Intelligence: Can AI be Taught Common Sense?

Human brains come with common sense settings, although some humans may have more than others. It’s the ability to sense or anticipate based on the situation and past experience. A gut instinct tells you what you can expect as the outcome if you take a certain action. You are able to read people. Common sense helps you manage and to understand other people’s emotions and feelings.

That is not something that computers can do. At least today. Common sense isn’t a quality that is built into them.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, summarized the problem as “the absence of common sense prevents intelligent systems from understanding their world, behaving reasonably in unforeseen situations, communicating naturally with people, and learning from new experiences. Its absence is considered the most significant barrier between the narrowly focused AI applications of today and the more general, human-like AI systems hoped for in the future.”

Matt Turek, a program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, said that “one of the challenges of state-of-the-art AI, or machine learning, is that it tends to be very narrow, so it’s focused on a particular task and doesn’t generalize very well. DARPA has enlisted child behavioral psychologists to map and encode the common sense that’s inspired by infants. Children aged zero to 18 months are probably some of the best learners in the world. They explore more and, in some ways, take more risks than adults.”

Dave Gunning, former program manager at DARPA, said that “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. 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.”

Abhishek Bhandwaldar, Research Engineer, MIT-IBM AI Lab, said that “Today’s machine learning models can have superhuman performance, but it is still unclear if they understand basic principles that drive human reasoning. For machines to successfully be able to have social interaction like humans do among themselves, they need to develop the ability to understand hidden mental states of humans. We’re making progress toward building AI agents that can infer mental states, predict future actions, and even work with human partners. However, we lack a rigorous benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s core psychological reasoning ability — its common sense.”

Can AI be taught common sense? Not yet.