How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise.
It's sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there-indefinitely. Its obstacle-avoidance, lane-following, and route-calculation capacities are all irrelevant; it fails to act because it lacks the common sense of a human driver, who would quickly figure out what's happening and find a workaround. In Machines like Us, Ron Brachman and Hector Levesque-both leading experts in AI-consider what it would take to create machines with common sense rather than just the specialized expertise of today's AI systems.
Using the stuck traffic light and other relatable examples, Brachman and Levesque offer an accessible account of how common sense might be built into a machine. They analyse common sense in humans, explain how AI over the years has focused mainly on expertise, and suggest ways to endow an AI system with both common sense and effective reasoning. Finally, they consider the critical issue of how we can trust an autonomous machine to make decisions, identifying two fundamental requirements for trustworthy autonomous AI systems- having reasons for doing what they do, and being able to accept advice. Both in the end are dependent on having common sense.
By:
Ronald J. Brachman,
Hector J. Levesque
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 222mm,
Width: 143mm,
Spine: 21mm
Weight: 414g
ISBN: 9780262547321
ISBN 10: 0262547325
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 14 November 2023
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preview ix 1 The Road to Common Sense 1 2 Common Sense in Humans 9 3 Expertise in AI Systems 25 4 Knowledge and Its Representation 51 5 A Commonsense Understanding of the World 67 6 Commonsense Knowledge 83 7 Representation and Reasoning, Part I 113 8 Representation and Reasoning, Part II 137 9 Common Sense in Action 159 10 Steps toward Implementation 183 11 Building Trust 197 Epilogue 215 Appendix 219 Bonus Chapter: The Logic of Common Sense 227 Acknowledgments 247 Notes 249 Bibliography 279 Index 297 About the Authors 305
Ronald J. Brachman is Director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. During a long career in industry, he held leadership positions at Bell Labs, Yahoo, and DARPA. Hector J. Levesque is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI (MIT Press), and other books.
