The late science editor of the Daily Telegraph, Adrian Berry, used to get a laugh by telling the following apocryphal anecdote.
An AI is asked to write a short story with the popular themes of religion, aristocracy, mystery and sex:
“Good Lord!” screamed the Duchess, “I’m pregnant! Whodunnit!?”
First time I heard this I was working on my PhD on the metaphysics of consciousness and the viability of conscious machines. I wondered at the time if the hypothetical silicon wordsmith would understand why she’d been so inadvertently and very mildly amusing.
Can a machine, even in principle, ever get a joke? Not tell one, for clearly it can do that, but get one?
Jokes have not been taken seriously enough by the philosophers. Neither have the deeper essences of amusement, humour and laughter more generally, come to that. There is an entanglement of distinctive concepts to be tidied up there and it’s strange that we haven’t had more fun doing just that – conceptual housekeeping being very much our thing....<<<Read More>>>....
