Get the latest tech news

One Genius' Lonely Crusade to Teach a Computer Common Sense (2016)

For decades, as the tech world passed him by, Doug Lenat has fed computers millions of rules for daily life. Is this the way to artificial common sense?

With help from this trio and a small team of additional researchers that includes as many trained philosophers as computer scientists, Lenat has spent the last three-and-a-half decades building what he calls a “common sense engine”—a system that attempts to digitally codify all the basic concepts humans take for granted but machines have never really grasped. Neural networks are so adept at tasks like recognizing images and understanding natural language that some voices, from Tesla founder Elon Musk on down, are warning that artificially intelligent machines could spell doom for the human race. This movement came to a head last week when AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent machine built by researchers at Google, used neural networks to beat one of the world’s best players at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern pastime that's exponentially more complex than chess.

Get the Android app