Common sense and competence
In Part I of this series, we saw examples of how machines, putatively endowed with “Artificial Intelligence,” commit laughably stupid mistakes doing grade-school arithmetic. See Dumb machines Part I
You’d think that if machines can make such stupid blunders in a domain where they are alleged to have superhuman powers—a simple task compared with, say, getting your kid to school when the bus has broken down and your car is in the shop—then they could never be expected to achieve a level of competence across many domains sufficient for world domination.
Possibly machines are not capable of the “common sense” that is vital to real, complicated life, where we range across many domains, often nearly simultaneously.
A trivial example from Part I: the machine correctly calculates 68 when asked for the product of “17 x 4.” But it calculates “17 x 4” as 69. Stupid, right? A human looks at the discrepancy and says aha! It’s the missing period that threw it off. Getting the correct answer would require knowing something about punctuation. The period is not a mathematical object, it’s a grammatical object. Getting the difference requires bridging from math to grammar—another common sense activity we do without consciously missing a beat.
Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part II: the Common Sense Factor”