Superintelligent AI Is Still a Myth

The common sense problem in AI is actually old, pretty much as old as the field itself. Turing himself alluded to it when he posed the problem of having a conversation--the Turing Test--as the proper aim of a matured and successful AI (though the term "AI" is an anachronism here; it was coined later). Old, or classic AI--all the work on AI done before the Web, basically--tried to tame common sense by adding concepts and rules to reason about concepts, known as "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning." This may seem silly today, but it's plausibly a more intuitive strategy for tackling common sense. One builds a large knowledge base with descriptions of alligators and races and legs and measurements and so on.