Wherever artificial intelligence is deployed, you will find it has failed in some amusing way. Take the strange errors made by translation algorithms that confuse having someone for dinner with, well, having someone for dinner.
But as AI is used in ever more critical situations, such as driving autonomous cars, making medical diagnoses, or drawing life-or-death conclusions from intelligence information, these failures will no longer be a laughing matter. That’s why DARPA, the research arm of the US military, is addressing AI’s most basic flaw: it has zero common sense.
“Common sense is the dark matter of artificial intelligence,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a research nonprofit based in Seattle that is exploring the limits of the technology. “It’s a little bit ineffable, but you see its effects on everything.”
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