AI goes to the movies:fast, intermediate and slow common sense

Common sense is largely tackled within AI as a set of abilities to solve problems in everyday surprising situations. This approach reduces the historical dynamic governing its constitution and transformations. As a social representation, the taken-for-granted and pre-reflexive abilities are made conscious and become changeable. Common sense is a coherent and dynamic symbolic apparatus, coherent, because it presents regularities, and dynamic because these regularities are adaptive to changing contexts. Historical common sense should be characterised as a floating signifier, giving continuity in change, and a chronology with duration and rhythm at three levels of sedimentation: the first, fast cycle of opinion, provokes frequent adjustments over a single lifetime; the second, slower, acts upon structures, provoking at best one to two adjustments of attitudes over a single lifetime; the third, very slow, long precedes and long continues individual lifetimes as mentalities, and thus appears as an immutable bedrock of value and thematic convictions. By examining the challenges of common sense to AI, and vice versa, we can highlight the current transformations of common sense which are characterised by “presentism”, thus bearing witness to the recomposition of the modern sense of time and, therefore, of our common sense.