ROBOTS ii3
In addition to pattern recognition, the second problem with the development of robots is even more fundamental, and that is their lack of
"common sense." Humans know, for example,
• Water is wet.
• Mothers are older than their daughters.
• Animals do not like pain.
• You don't come back after you die.
• Strings can pull, but not push.
• Sticks can push, but cannot pull.
• Time does not run backward.
But there is no line of calculus or mathematics that can express
these truths. We know all of this because we have seen animals, water,
and strings, and we have figured out the truth by ourselves. Children
learn common sense by bumping into reality. The intuitive laws of biology and physics are learned the hard way, by interacting with the
real world. But robots haven't experienced this. They know only what
has been programmed into them beforehand.
(As a result, the jobs of the future will also include those that
require common sense, that is, artistic creativity, originality, acting talent, humor, entertainment, analysis, and leadership. These are precisely the qualities that make us uniquely human and that computers
have difficulty duplicating.)
In the past, mathematicians have tried to mount a crash program
that could amass all the laws of common sense once and for all. The
most ambitious attempt is CYC (short for encyclopedia), the brainchild
of Douglas Lenat, the head of Cycorp. Like the Manhattan Project, the
$2 billion crash program that built the atomic bomb, CYC was to be the
"Manhattan Project" of artificial intelligence, the final push that would
achieve true artificial intelligence.
Not surprisingly, Lenat's motto is, Intelligence is 10 million rules.
(Lenat has a novel way in which to find new laws of common sense;
he has his staff read the pages of scandalous tabloids and lurid gossip
rags. Then he asks CYC if it can spot the errors in the tabloids. Actu-
In addition to pattern recognition, the second problem with the development of robots is even more fundamental, and that is their lack of
"common sense." Humans know, for example,
• Water is wet.
• Mothers are older than their daughters.
• Animals do not like pain.
• You don't come back after you die.
• Strings can pull, but not push.
• Sticks can push, but cannot pull.
• Time does not run backward.
But there is no line of calculus or mathematics that can express
these truths. We know all of this because we have seen animals, water,
and strings, and we have figured out the truth by ourselves. Children
learn common sense by bumping into reality. The intuitive laws of biology and physics are learned the hard way, by interacting with the
real world. But robots haven't experienced this. They know only what
has been programmed into them beforehand.
(As a result, the jobs of the future will also include those that
require common sense, that is, artistic creativity, originality, acting talent, humor, entertainment, analysis, and leadership. These are precisely the qualities that make us uniquely human and that computers
have difficulty duplicating.)
In the past, mathematicians have tried to mount a crash program
that could amass all the laws of common sense once and for all. The
most ambitious attempt is CYC (short for encyclopedia), the brainchild
of Douglas Lenat, the head of Cycorp. Like the Manhattan Project, the
$2 billion crash program that built the atomic bomb, CYC was to be the
"Manhattan Project" of artificial intelligence, the final push that would
achieve true artificial intelligence.
Not surprisingly, Lenat's motto is, Intelligence is 10 million rules.
(Lenat has a novel way in which to find new laws of common sense;
he has his staff read the pages of scandalous tabloids and lurid gossip
rags. Then he asks CYC if it can spot the errors in the tabloids. Actu-