Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

We all know that artificial intelligence is an important thing. We've talked about it here on

Mindscape. I'm sure we're going to keep talking about it down the road. We also know that it faces

some obstacles. I don't mean the kind of ethical obstacles we've talked about before. You know,

what should yourself drive in Cardo? I mean, obstacles in creating what would truly be considered

a human level artificial intelligence. There are certain things that computers, that AI's,

are really, really good at, way better than any human being, and there's certain other things

they still fall short at. And those things that artificial intelligence is not very good at can

be lumped under the general heading of common sense. There are aspects of the world that seem

completely obvious and intuitive to every human being from a very young age, and yet not only

do computers not know them automatically, we even have trouble teaching them to computers.

So today's guest is Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and complexity theorist at Portland State

University and the Santa Fe Institute. She's the author of several books that I really like,

and that her new book is called Artificial Intelligence, a guide for thinking humans. And it doesn't

pretend to give the once and for all solution to this problem, but it lays out exactly this issue

of how artificial intelligence works and why common sense, as important and as basic as it is,

is one of the most difficult things to teach to a computer. We also talk about what the ramifications

of this difficulty are for what AI is, where it's going, how it will be good and bad as we move

into the future. So let's go.

Melanie Mitchell, thanks for being on the Blindscape podcast.

Oh, I'm glad to be here. So you have an advantage over other people who write popular books about

artificial intelligence, I think, which is that Douglas Hofstadter was your PhD thesis advisor.

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