Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?
Steven Strogatz,
Quanta Magazine,
Jul 18, 2024
So this is a pretty interesting interview. The answer to the question in the title, I hope, is 'No', but not for the reason you may think. Here's my reasoning. As Yejin Choi says, "it's reasonable to suspect that humans don't necessarily try to predict which word comes next, but we rather try to focus on making sense of the world. So we tend to abstract away immediately." Now that's not quite true - AI also 'abstracts', but can use far more data points than a human, so its abstractions just look like statistical generalizations to us, not common sense generalizations. But like a human, it can also generalize too quickly and inappropriately - that's why, for example, it will respond (like many humans) incorrectly to "If I left five clothes to dry out in the sun, and it took them five hours to dry completely, how long would it take to dry 30 clothes?" (It's not '30 hours', of course, it's 'five'). Human common sense (for example, folk psychology) has more in common with the answer '30 hours' than 'five'. And the thing is: an AI can be trained to avoid such errors. But humans, bless them, will keep on making them. And that is just common sense.
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