Toward a New Science of Common Sense

Abstract

Common sense has always been of interest in Artificial Intelligence, but has rarely taken center stage. Despite its mention in one of John McCarthy's earliest papers and years of work by dedicated researchers, arguably no AI system with a serious amount of general common sense has ever emerged. Why is that? What's missing? Examples of AI systems' failures of common sense abound, and they point to AI's frequent focus on expertise as the cause. Those attempting to break the resulting brittleness barrier, even in the context of modern deep learning, have tended to invest their energy in large numbers of small bits of commonsense knowledge. While important, all the commonsense knowledge fragments in the world don't add up to a system that actually demonstrates common sense in a human-like way. We advocate examining common sense from a broader perspective than in the past. Common sense should be considered in the context of a full cognitive system with history, goals, desires, and drives, not just in isolated circumscribed examples. A fresh look is needed: common sense is worthy of its own dedicated scientific exploration.

Initial version published in Proceedings of AAAI-22, the Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Original version extended slightly to include acknowledgement of more recent work, including new references, and to clarify remarks in a few paragraphs