The Quest to Build Robots With Common Sense

For all the hyperbole and hysterical media coverage, today’s robots are not really all that smart. Sure, they can operate motor vehicles and perform precise surgeries and handle repetitious assembly work and disarm bombs and vacuum your home—all very useful things—but they can only function within closed systems under a fixed set of rules usually developed by ingesting tons of data via machine learning. They remain stubbornly more artificial than intelligent. Five of the biggest names in AI and robotics science want to change all that and have launched a new Palo Alto, CA-based startup called Robust AI with the…...