It can identify objects in a fraction of a second, imitate the human voice and recommend new music, but most machine "intelligence" lacks the most basic understanding of everyday objects and actions -- in other words, common sense. DARPA is teaming up with the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to see about changing that. The Machine Common Sense program aims to both define the problem and engender progress on it, though no one is expecting this to be "solved" in a year or two. But if AI is to escape the prison of the hyper-specific niches where it works well, it's going to need to grow a brain that does more than execute a classification task at great speed. "The absence of common sense prevents an intelligent system from understanding its world, communicating naturally with people, behaving reasonably in unforeseen situations, and learning from new experiences. This absence is perhaps the most significant barrier between the narrowly focused AI applications we have today and the more general AI applications we would like to create in the future," explained DARPA's Dave Gunning in a press release.