Hey, robot, you’re a real genius

Artificial intelligence is not good with sarcasm, humor, or other nuanced forms of human communication. Kevin Zawacki of The Atlantic writes, “Bots’ understanding of humor is so stunted and feeble, it’s often a punchline itself.”

Perhaps we can’t program bots to be sarcastic because we can’t accurately define sarcasm. Zawacki quotes Noah Goodman, an assistant professor at Stanford University specializing in psychology, computer science, and linguistics, as saying, ““Before you can program a computer to do something cool, you have to understand what the cool thing is,” Goodman said. “We’re sort of only at the beginning of understanding what nuanced communication actually is.”

And Zawacki quotes Elisabeth Camp, an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies the philosophy of language and mind, as saying that sarcasm is “deeply, deeply human.”

Missy Cummings, reports Zawacki, notes that sarcasm goes beyond words and involves tone and nonverbal cues like facial expressions. Cummings, an associate professor at MIT studying human interaction with systems, calls a sarcastic robot a “Holy Grail.”

Writes Zawacki, “Cummings also notes—perhaps sardonically—engineers may not be the best equipped to decipher sarcasm and transform it into code: They require help from comedians.”

Cummings suggests that artificial intelligence that can express nuanced emotion is at least 20 years away, even in the academic world. Perhaps Zawacki quotes robotics expert Sebastian Thrun as saying, “The last thing I want my robot to be is sarcastic. I want them to be pragmatic and reliable—just like my dishwasher.”

Robots may be coming for many jobs, but it seems comedians will be safe for a couple of more decades.