[Animats]

> a book about consciousness

Too many people have written books about consciousness. There's much tail-chasing in that space, all the way back to Aristotle. Write one about common sense. Current AI sucks at common sense. We can't even achieve the level of common sense of a squirrel yet.

Working definition of common sense: getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup.

[cornholio]

That's not a working definition of common sense. You've pulled as dependencies the entirety of human reasoning and self-reflection, a theory of mind for all sentient creatures you encounter and a gargantuan amount of context sensitive socio-cultural learning, to name but a few.

[ben_w]

For most of my life, people use "common sense" as an insult, "XYZ has no common sense" or similar — therefore I think it is, in practice, the overton window of the person saying it.

Others define it as "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument", which LLMs absolutely do demonstrate.

What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot.

[bamboozled]

Same could be said for a driver less train I suppose or the auto-pilot on a 747.

[creer]

I think you can go to a CNC machine, or a rock.

[Animats]

> What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot.

That speaks well of the Waymo autopilot, which does considerably better than that. Tesla "self driving", not so much.

[ben_w]

The Waymo percentage was calculated based on the disengagement rate and a guess at the average speed.

Tesla may be the same or not, but they aren't publishing current numbers where I could find them, only really old numbers.

Not that the exact value matters, because so far as I can tell the only autopilot worse than your threshold was the Uber one that crashed into a pedestrian pushing a bike. Even Tesla's 2016 version beat that.

[tgaj]

"Common sense" is just knowledge about society and our environment. It's not some kind of magic.