If AI's So Smart, Why Can't It Grasp Cause and Effect?

Here’s a troubling fact. “Big tech companies would love to have systems that can do this kind of thing.” The most popular cutting-edge AI technique, deep learning, has delivered some stunning advances in recent years, fueling excitement about the potential of AI. It involves showing an AI program a simple virtual world filled with a few moving objects, together with questions and answers about the scene and what’s going on. The questions and answers are labeled, similar to how an AI system learns to recognize a cat by being shown hundreds of images labeled “cat.” Systems that use advanced machine learning exhibited a big blind spot. “We as humans have the ability to reason about cause and effect, and we need to have AI systems that can do the same.” A lack of causal understanding can have real consequences, too.