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.

Machines are judged more harshly in accidental scenarios; people take a consequentialist approach to judging machines, wherein intent is irrelevant, but not to humans. The moral outrage against artificial intelligence (AI) often is justified. AI has been involved in wrongful arrests, biased recidivism scores, and multiple scandals involving misclassified photos or gender-stereotypical translations. AI researchers are well aware of these problems and are actively working to fix them. But as the dust settles, it is worth asking not only whether AI is "good" or "bad," but what these judgment episodes teach us about our moral intuitions.

We accept that to err is human. When our electronic counterparts fail us--whether its baggage screening software or the latest artificial intelligence--we are quick to shun their advice in the future. That has big implications as machines infiltrate the workplace, offering services once provided by human colleagues. University of Wisconsin researchers recently sought to test how we might get along with our future AI coworkers. The researchers asked 160 college undergraduates to forecast scheduling for hospital rooms, an unfamiliar task.