  Common sense has always been of interest in Artificial Intelligence, but has
rarely taken center stage. Despite its mention in one of John McCarthy's
earliest papers and years of work by dedicated researchers, arguably no AI
system with a serious amount of general common sense has ever emerged. Why is
that? What's missing? Examples of AI systems' failures of common sense abound,
and they point to AI's frequent focus on expertise as the cause. Those
attempting to break the resulting brittleness barrier, even in the context of
modern deep learning, have tended to invest their energy in large numbers of
small bits of commonsense knowledge. While important, all the commonsense
knowledge fragments in the world don't add up to a system that actually
demonstrates common sense in a human-like way. We advocate examining common
sense from a broader perspective than in the past. Common sense should be
considered in the context of a full cognitive system with history, goals,
desires, and drives, not just in isolated circumscribed examples. A fresh look
is needed: common sense is worthy of its own dedicated scientific exploration.
