Some expert systems need common sense.

An expert system is a computer program intended to embody the knowledge and ability of an expert in a certain domain. The ideas behind them and several examples have been described in other lectures in this symposium. Their performance in their specialized domains are often very impressive. Nevertheless, hardly any of them have certain common sense knowledge and ability possessed by any non-feeble-minded human. This lack makes them “brittle”. By this is meant that they are difficult to extend beyond the scope originally contemplated by their designers, and they usually don’t recognize their own limitations. Many important applications will require common sense abilities. The object of this lecture is to describe common sense abilities and the problems that require them. Common sense facts and methods are only very partially understood today, and extending this understanding is the key problem facing artificial intelligence. This isn’t exactly a new point of view. I have been advocating “Computer Programs with Common Sense”since I wrote a paper with that title in