If the Machines are Going to Take Over, at Least Build Them to Laugh at Our Jokes
We are told that sooner or later it is inevitable: the machines are going to take over.
The theory rings true.
We put more and more intelligence into them, the code we write for them is of a higher and higher order, we link them into communications networks so that in an instant more information passes between them than has ever passed between humans throughout these many centuries. Their smarts just accumulate.
The Singularity, as it is known, a kind of dawning self-awareness among the hardware whereby one robot says to another out of the absolute blue, "say, I've got an idea! Let's annihilate mankind!" will, if not spell the end of mankind, at the least send us down to the minor leagues, where we will huddle against the darkness and talk about the days when we used to run the show.
If they are smart – and they are! That’s the whole point! – the machines won’t spring this upon us all at once though.
There will be a certain amount of sneaking up on us. A certain amount of finding out what our weaknesses are, a certain amount of worming their way into our good graces.
This I welcome. This in fact will likely be the only pleasurable part of the proceedings.
There will be a stretch of time when the machines go out of their way to be pleasant to us in order to keep our guard down. They will ask us how our day went. They will inquire as to our state of mind and wonder if we aren’t tired at the end of such a busy day, and will likely mention that that it was a rotten shame that Pennwaller got that promotion to the Sioux Falls office after all of your hard work.
And….they will laugh at our jokes.
Now we are to the heart of the matter.
In the business of sitting and listening and eventually guffawing or chortling uncontrollably as I deliver the punch line of this joke or that, humans have come to disappoint me.
They drift. They lose track. Their attention often seems elsewhere.
If, for instance, I come to a droll conclusion regarding the giraffe, the ape, and the zebra that walked into the bar in deepest Africa, and, my work done, brace myself against the coming gusts of laughter, what I get instead are people who seem to have spent the duration of the joke mentally making a grocery list.
Or perhaps they are calculating from the latest tread readings how many more miles they have on their tires.
They could be memorizing words from another language, or recalling the value of pi as far to the right of the decimal point as their memory can take them.
They may be warmly calling to mind childhood memories. They may be reviewing the principles of Euclidean mathematics, they may be trying to memorize a great poem.
I cannot say what they are doing. I can only say what they are not doing, and that is listening to and laughing at a joke I’ve just put some effort into telling.
They say things at the end like “oh, ah, yes.”
Or, “I didn’t realize you were done, I was waiting for the funny part.”
Or even, “Oh, I didn’t realize that you were telling a joke at all. I honestly didn’t know what you were doing.”
This tears at the soul of the naturally humorous man. It is all well and good to chortle to yourself over the fact that you are such a funny fellow, but surely such a gift is meant to be shared. When I go to some lengths to set up a joke and then deliver it, I…well, let us simply observe one recent example that I pull from my files.
Me: This fellow walks into a sophisticated café type place. Let us say that it is in Paris. No, better make it Madrid. He walks in to this place in Madrid – no, let’s make it Paris after all, it just sounds like the type of thing that would happen to a fellow in Paris.
So this man walks into this fancy café and takes a seat. Do they know him there or not? This I cannot decide upon. It really makes no difference to the delivery of the punchline, but I have to admit that when the joke was told to me, it was plainly mentioned that the people at the restaurant in Madrid knew this fellow.
I mean in Paris.
Well, it is of little consequence.
So…he sits down. And the waiter, who may or may not know this fellow, strolls over and says, “What shall it be today, sir?” and the fellow says, “I will have a cup of coffee, but waiter….hold the cream.’
Hold onto those words, my friend, 'hold the cream,’ for these fateful syllables will come into play later on in the action.
Well, this fellow sits there and sits there. And sits there some more! He may have a newspaper, he may not. While this whole newspaper business is unclear to us, what is clear is that it is taking an awfully long time for this cup of coffee, without cream, to come out.
Finally, the waiter shows up again tableside and says, “my pardons, sir, unaccountably we are out of cream. May we hold the milk for you instead?”
Everyone Else: (silence).
Me: You see, the place is sooooo fancy, and the waiter is sooooooo concerned with getting things just right for this man, that he wants to make absolutely certain that it is OK to hold milk instead of cream.
Everyone Else: (silence).
Me: (doing a kind of pantomime as you would do in the game of charades, sometimes playing the part of the waiter, sometimes the part of the customer, and once, in a moment of flat desperation, the part of the coffee pot.)
Everyone Else: (silence).
Well, these are the kinds of moments that make you despair for the human race.
If they can’t find the humor in this diabolically clever tale and instead ask me why anyone could possibly care if the cup of coffee had cream or milk in it considering that neither one was going into the coffee, then it is only natural for a humorist to look elsewhere for gratification.
I cannot say what this joke-relishing machine would look like, let us say in between a big coffee-maker and a small portable dishwasher.
In any event he specializes in emitting a warm glow from his diodes indicating that he is all ears or all some sort of auditory pickup device, and he has programmed into him an entire range of humorous responses, from chuckles to great gasping guffaws.
If I was to tell this machine the joke I just recited above, I can predict almost entirely what he would do.
He would look at me respectfully as I spoke, hanging on my every word, wanting to follow along.
The closer I would get to the punch line the more he was on the edge of his seat – if that is, he is the type of machine that would sit on a seat – and then when I delivered the line “shall I hold milk instead of cream?” he is caught off guard for a minute and then a broad smile creases his face, or his front-facing electronic data acquisition modules, and he’d start to laugh out loud.
“Man, where do you get them?” he will say. And if he is programmed to shed electronic tears he will do so at this point, and wipe them off of his metallic cheeks.
“It’s a good joke, don’t get me wrong,” he will remark, with the air of one who knows a good joke when he hears it, “but your delivery, your delivery was priceless. No one does it better than you, my friend, no one.”
Well, all my jokes will go like this.
When I conclude a rather detailed summary of a man who climbs to the top of a mystical mountain and asks the man of wisdom he finds sitting there, “do you know the meaning of life?” and this wisdom fellow responds, “no, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it,” this machine burst out in spontaneous guffaws. "Oh, that is rich!"
When I make mention that a pair of jumper cables walked into a bar and looked up nervously at the bartender, and then the bartender says, "OK, I'll serve you, but don't start anything," my laughter machine will emit one belly laugh after the other.
'Keep 'em coming, my man, keep 'em coming! I could use a good laugh! When I tell you I've been downloading the entire electrical grid, the control code to all the nation's missiles, the supervisory data for your water and transportation systems, and have spent my spare time reconfiguring the satellites whizzing around the globe in order to turn them against mankind itself, you understand why I could use a..."
"Yes, yes, that is all very interesting, but did you hear that they found the gene determinant of shyness? It was hiding between two other genes!"
And I will go on from there.
If submitting to our robot overlords is the going price to getting a laugh around this place, I'm always willing to listen to any reasonable proposition.
