US Department of Defense commits $2B to training AI to have "common sense"

While artificial intelligence is being painted by companies and government as the catch-all answer to many of today's inefficiencies and problems, it currently has one glaring shortcoming: It can't answer common sense questions. In an effort to address this current shortcoming of AI, The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is committing $2 billion dollars over the next five years to its Machine Common Sense (MCS) Program. The program aims to enable computers to communicate naturally, behave reasonably in new situations, and learn from new experiences. Thanks in part to Iron Man (and Elon Musk) fame, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka "DARPA", an agency within the DoD, may be one of the few alphabet soup government agencies with a future-tech-savvy reputation. That reputation is well deserved, too, if history has anything to say about it.