We’re submerged in an ocean of flashy, highly visible high technology, today, but when real Artificial Intelligence arrives it will fade into the background.

Doug Lenat writes programs that are creative: they think up new mathematical conjectures, predict terrorist plots, and propose unsuspected disease pathways. Unlike other machine learning algorithms, his programs are based on Sherlock-Holmes-style reasoning, not statistics. A former computer science professor at Stanford, Doug and his CYC.com team are now hard at work here in Austin, trying to give computers the one thing they need most: common sense.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx