Verbal common sense will prevent AIs from harvesting kings and unlocking oranges

If I hand you an apple, you know from experience that it isn't something you can drive. And the tree it came from can't be woven, or its seeds bandied. You know that's nonsense, but AIs don't have the benefit of years spent navigating the world, and as such have no real idea as to what you can do with what -- but a little common sense could be coming their way. Researchers at Brigham Young want to make sure that future androids and AI entities that interact with the real world have at least a basic understanding of what certain things are and do. "When machine learning researchers turn robots or artificially intelligent agents loose in unstructured environments, they try all kinds of crazy stuff," said Ben Murdoch, co-author of the BYU study, in a news release.