Ready to be scared by AI? Well you may just be about to be scared silly.

Virtual assistants and chatbots aren’t the most intelligent beings around at the moment. That’s because they lack the common sense that us humans have. Most of us anyway. These types of machine learning programmes rely on specific situations that they’ve encountered previously. Thus they react accordingly to the data you input.

However, this may be about to change. Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) have come up with a brand new test. This test is called Arc Reasoning Challenge (ARC). This test will determine whether artificial intelligence has the ability to ‘learn’ common sense. By testing it’s understanding of the way that our world operates.

The easiest way to explain why machines don’t have common sense is as follows. Human’s see a problem or are faced with a problem. Humans then use common sense to fill in the gaps of any problems that they are faced and then act on that problem accordingly. Machines only act on the data that’s put in to them. They can’t see a problem, pull information from their memory and then solve it. They have to be told ‘this is the way to solve this problem’ ‘solve it’ (execute programme)

AI Test

The researchers will throw basic multiple choice questions at the machines. These questions will put their general knowledge to the test. One of the questions is “Which item below is not made from a material grown in nature?” The answers are ‘cotton shirt, wooden chair, plastic spoon, grass basket’ If researchers from the Allen Institute can make the machine pull information from previously learned data. This will prove that the system can grasp common sense. Which no other AI technology can do.