Why We Forgive Humans More Readily Than Machines

Before AI was hot, Henry Lieberman, a computer scientist, invited me to see his group's work at MIT. Henry was obsessed with the idea that AI lacked common sense. So, together with his colleagues Catherine Havasi and Robyn Speer, he had been collecting commonsense statements in a Web site. Commonsense statements are facts that are obvious to humans but are hard to grasp for machines. They are things such as "water is wet" or "love is a feeling." They are also a sore spot for AI, since scholars are still working to understand why machines struggle with commonsense reasoning.