🚀 go-pugleaf

This article is from Sherry Marcus at Cornell University
 and was extracted from the news system on June 9, 1986

[from a posting to "mod.ai"]

I have been thinking a lot about the notion of common sense and its possible 
implementation into expert systems. Here are my ideas; I would appreciate your 
thoughts.

Webster's Dictionary defines common sense as a 'practical knowledge'.  I 
contend that all knowledge both informal and formal comes from this 'practical 
knowledge'.  After all, if one thinks about Physics, Logic,or Chemistry, much 
of it makes practical sense in the real world. 

For example,a truck colliding with a Honda Civic will cause more destruction 
than 2 Hondas colliding together. I think that people took this practical 
knowledge of the world and developed formal principles.  

It is common sense which distiguishes man from machine. 

If a bum on the street were to tell you that if you give him $5.00 he will 
make you a million dollars in a week, you would generally walk away and ignore 
him.  If the same man were to input it into a so called intelligent machine,
the machine would not know if he was Rockefeller or an indigent.

My point is this, I think it is intrinically impossible to program common 
sense because a computer is not a man. A computer cannot experience what man 
can; it cannot see or make ubiquitous judgements that man can.  We may be 
able to program common-sense like rules into it,but this is not tantamount 
to real world common sense because real world common sense is drawn from a 
'database' that could never be matched by a simulated one.

Thank you for listening.

                       sherry marcus kvqj@cornella