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The Code of Common Sense
How Douglas Lenat’s Cyc project transformed AI
In a TEDx talk titled ‘Computers with Common Sense’ in 2015, Doug Lenat, an American computer scientist and researcher in Artificial Intelligence, described a new era for AI, an era of collaboration between humans and AI that would usher in a new period of human history. Lenat suggested that just as human history can be divided into the periods before and after the development of tools, future historians may similarly categorize history into the eras before and after the rise of Artificial Intelligence, indicating that the emergence of AI will be a milestone in the course of human civilization.
Lenat (1950–2023), a University of Pennsylvania graduate in Mathematics and Physics with a Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics and a Ph. D. in Computer Science, believed that the function of the human brain could be used as a roadmap for the development of AI.
Instead of trying to imitate the brain’s ‘logical’ functions (AI research at the time focused on statistical analysis of data), he believed that AI needed to focus more on replicating brain functions like creativity and intuition and that the way to achieve this would be to instill some kind of ‘common sense’ into the programs, to be able to emulate human problem-solving processes.
