If nothing else, you can this much for artificial intelligence: They're rarely afraid to look stupid. If a learning A.I. encounters something outside its preprogrammed knowledge, it will not typically be shy in asking the person with whom it is speaking to clarify. This can, however, make for rather monotonous conversation for the human involved in talking to the chatbot, voice assistant, or generally conversant robot: "What's an apple?" "What's tiramisu?" "What's cured meat?" "What's do you know literally anything about food you stupid recipe chatbot?" You get the idea, and as researchers from Japan's Osaka University point out in a recent spotlight on their work, that last line is indicative of the real problem facing A.I.: Asking questions might be the best way for them to learn, but that doesn't count for much if the barrage of questions is so irritating or tedious that the human wanders off.

If nothing else, you can this much for artificial intelligence: They're rarely afraid to look stupid. If a learning A.I. encounters something outside its preprogrammed knowledge, it will not typically be shy in asking the person with whom it is speaking to clarify. This can, however, make for rather monotonous conversation for the human involved in talking to the chatbot, voice assistant, or generally conversant robot: "What's an apple?" "What's tiramisu?" "What's cured meat?" "What's do you know literally anything about food you stupid recipe chatbot?" You get the idea, and as researchers from Japan's Osaka University point out in a recent spotlight on their work, that last line is indicative of the real problem facing A.I.: Asking questions might be the best way for them to learn, but that doesn't count for much if the barrage of questions is so irritating or tedious that the human wanders off. It's not enough for the A.I. to know what it doesn't know.