Common Sense for A.I. Is a Great Idea

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of interaction with any digital assistant to realize one is not in the presence of a very bright interlocutor. Among some of the unexpected items users have found in their shopping lists after talking to (or near) Amazon's Alexa are 150,000 bottles of shampoo, sled dogs, "hunk of poo," and a girlfriend. The mere exasperation of talking to a personal assistant can be enough to miss human companionship, feel nostalgia of all things analog and dumb, and foreswear any future attempts at communicating with mindless pieces of metal inexplicably labelled "smart."