Think Mint Media

AI's Common Sense Problem: Our Best Defense There's a joke that's been making the rounds in AI research circles for years. A robot walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender, curious, asks if the robot can pass a simple test: "If you're in a room with a candle, a newspaper, and a wooden chair, and you need to start a fire to stay warm, what do you burn first?" The robot thinks for a moment and answers confidently: "The newspaper, because it has the lowest ignition temperature." The bartender shakes his head. "Wrong. You burn the match first." It's a corny joke, but it reveals something profound about artificial intelligence. For all their superhuman abilities at chess, protein folding, and image recognition, AI systems routinely fail at tasks that any five-year-old would find trivial. They can write poetry but don't understand that you can't fit a giraffe in a refrigerator. They can diagnose rare diseases but might not ...

Trust has always been the invisible currency that keeps civilization running. We trust banks to safeguard our money, governments to protect our rights, doctors to heal us, and journalists to tell us the truth. But something fundamental is shifting beneath our feet. Two technologies, artificial intelligence and blockchain, are waging a quiet battle to redefine what trust means in the 21st century. This isn't a conflict fought with weapons or rhetoric. It's a philosophical war, playing out in server farms, research labs, and boardrooms around the world, and the victor will determine how we verify truth, validate identity, and conduct business for generations to come. At first glance, AI and blockchain seem like natural allies. Both emerged from the digital revolution, both promise to revolutionize how we live and work, and both inspire equal parts excitement and dread. Yet look closer and you'll find they represent fundamentally opposing visions of how trust should work in ...

Every era gets a question that refuses to stay theoretical. For the nineteenth century it was whether steam would remake our lives. For the twentieth it was whether electronic brains could outthink their human creators. For the twenty first century the question is smaller sounding but stranger: can a machine feel? It is easy to answer that question with a shrug. Machines do not have nervous systems, blood, hormones, or childhood memories. They do not sleep, dream, or carry scars. But the more interesting question is not whether machines feel exactly like humans. The more interesting question is what happens when machines convincingly act as if they feel. When a chatbot says I am sorry you are hurting and the person on the other end feels less alone, what really happened in that moment? If you work in product, engineering, policy, therapy, marketing, or any field that touches people, this is not merely academic. We are already designing systems that simulate emotional understanding....

Every few months a new wave of tech hype tries to predict the future. Not long ago, people swore crypto would replace banks overnight. Then the metaverse would swallow our social lives. Now it is AI, and the loudest voices keep repeating the same dramatic idea: intelligent systems will replace humans completely. Except in the real world, something very different is happening. AI systems are expanding faster than any technology before them, but the most valuable results are not coming from replacing people. They are coming from collaboration. The companies making the biggest gains are blending human judgment with machine speed. The workers rising the fastest are the ones learning how to partner with tools instead of fighting them or handing over everything to them. In other words, hybrid intelligence is beating pure automation. When McKinsey examined early enterprise AI adoption in 2023, the firms reporting the strongest productivity jumps were the ones combining human oversight...