Flatus Ex Machina, Part 2

too long, had to break it up into two. But it has everything it has, uh, it has humor, it has theories of humor, it has killer robots, references to RoboCop, everything you could ask for. One of my favorite things explaining a joke to death, yes and then yes yeah. Yeah. Basically this is a lot of joke explaining. But I think by the end of it, everyone will still retain

their ability to laugh. All right, So, in thinking about what's so funny about machine failure, uh, and and even machine success along a certain you know, parameter of distance from what from what it's ultimate level of success would be, you know, AI, that's sort of succeeding but still isn't really there. Um, I guess it's worthwhile to look at what are some of the main theories out there about what humor is? Like, why do we find anything funny

not just machines? Yeah, because it becomes increasingly difficult to really uh nail it down, you know, you come back to that whole idea of it's funny because it's funny or you know what when you see it. Uh. This topic has come up a few times on the show before um most recently two thousands, seventeens laughing during horror movies.

That was when Christian was on the show and we talked about you know, what is it about horror movies like frightening, terrifying films that that elicits laughter from us? And then there were a few other ones in the past, The healing power of laughter, the killing joke, funny or Die. These are all episodes of stuff to blow your mind. You can you can check out in the vault if you so desire. Yeah, and so what if you go and check those out, I'm sure you as you'll probably

found before. There's no one theory of human right and nobody agrees, but there's sort of a host of competing theories that I would say aren't even always totally contradicting of one another. They they sort of partially overlap and partially contradict one another. Right, Yeah, there's not really a theory of everything per se, but like each one feels a little bit right, like each theory is is kind of fondling the elephant. Yeah, exactly. Uh So, a brief

run through of a few at the top. And there's no way to explore all the theories of humor. But if you are the most commonly cited and most popular ones, one would be the superiority theory. And this is propounded in some classical works, like in the works of Plato and Aristotle. This one is actually is kind of nasty,

But sometimes I guess humor is kind of nasty. It proposes that we laugh when we notice someone is less fortunate than us in one way or another, and the laughter comes from our feeling that we occupy a place of superiority. We sort of deploy it as a form of scorn on somebody else. And Plato and his Philibus dialogue, which is discussing the nature of pleasure and different kinds of pleasure, like why pleasures of the mind might be

superior to pleasures of the flesh. Plato has Socrates claim that we laugh at people who do not recognize their own misfortune, for example, when people are stupid but think themselves brilliant, or when people are ugly but think themselves very handsome. And I would say this clearly doesn't cover all types of humor, Like, you know, what about self deprecating humor when you can laugh at yourself, But there's

something there that is clearly present in some humor. Yeah, well, you know, when it comes to self deprecating humor and laughing at yourself, I think it does make sense when you consider our abilities to sometimes step outside of ourselves and see ourselves as a character in a story, sort of the infectious nature of narrative there. But then also in the way that we use theory of mind way too much to try and imagine how others see us.

So maybe, like, if you're trying to roll with this theory, you'd say that self deprecating humor is almost when we pretend that we are ourselves someone else and you like step step back and you scorn a different version of yourself. Yeah, basically like or you're just kind of imagining how scornful other people were being to you because of something you

did or said or thought. Yeah. Um, I mean another thing I would just say is that unless you're a horrible person, and maybe you know, Plato and Aristotle were in some ways very smart but also very horrible people, unless you're a really bad person, you don't find most types of misfortunes of other people funny. I mean, I do see a certain distinction along Plato's lens in the Philippus, where like a person just failing to do things that

you could succeed at is generally not very funny. Like somebody trying to solve a math problem you could solve and they can't do it, that's not funny. But like if a man proclaims himself to be one of the greatest brains of all time and then is making basic errors of logic and math, that's usually funny. Yeah. I think a lot of it hinges on just you know, what are the stakes and what sort of misfortune is

taking place? Like Another sort of example of this is when someone thinks they are refined about something, uh, and maybe they're a little snobbish about it but there, but it turns out their tastes are not quite as refined

as they thought. Um. I think there was an episode of Three's Company back you know in the day, in which a don Knots character is ordering like a fine scotch at a bar and he's really talking it up like he knows what he's talking about, exactly what kind of scotch he wants, and then when the bartender finally serves it to him, he requests that the rest of the glass be filled up with root beer, and you know, it's like, like, that's that's so that's hilarious because he

turns out he's not as as refined as he thought. But then it's also like we were being snobbish in making that judgment. Uh, And it's and that's always kind of a dick move, right because in anything like whatever your thing is, that you feel like you're refined and be at food or drinks or film or literature, like there was a point in your life when you were not when you were the person that was the subject

of scorn. And you know, ultimately we're being fair. You should celebrate that they are at all interested in the in this thing at all and that they are on hopefully on some sort of the same journey that you are, but instead we often laugh and said, can you believe that guy just put root beer all in that sky? I think that's a really good point. So I don't know. I would say I definitely see something going on here that there are definitely elements of this in humor, but

I don't think it explains all humor. I don't know if maybe, maybe, maybe not. I don't know if it's a good fit for why machines are funny, because obviously machines aren't people exactly, but maybe we sort of see

them as people when we think they're funny. Yeah, I think if we if you factor in the actual and or perceived abilities of AI and robots, either either what they can actually do or more I think, to the point what our science fiction and our futurist scenarios have proposed that they will do or could do one day, because we end up with this situation where like we watch our room but do something stupid, and there's it's hilarious because like, ha, you're never going to terminate or me,

like you can't even you can't even deal with the

uh with this rug or this pile of cat vomit. Well, actually, though I would say another reason this does kind of connect is it does kind of connect to Plato's thing about laughing atself ignorance, because one of the funniest things that I sort of identified earlier about like the D two O nine scene and all that, one of the funniest things about the ways that machines fail is the way that they are just so completely oblivious to their own shortcomings, the way they just uh, the way I

think of it is that they fail and then plow straight ahead. You know, they have they have done something crucially wrong, and they do not appreciate this fact. All right, let's keep rolling. What are some other theories can discuss? Okay, next one would be like the nervous energy release theory. And this is not surprisingly at all a take that was popular with Freudians. Under this model, laughter is sort of a pleasurable release of built up psychic tension caused

by fear or apprehension. Uh. And there's a certain kind of logic to this, right in the way that's a good Comedians repeatedly build at tension and then dissipated in various ways. I bet this also goes with the laughing during horror movies thing, you know, Yeah, for sure, Like you, you get your tension built up when there's something scary is about to happen, and then after it's over you

you release the tension and you can laugh. Yeah. Certainly with with comedians who really leaned into like the awkwardness and the tension, like say like an Andy Kaufman. You know where their whole their whole bits or if you want to call them bits, where it's really just making everyone uncomfortable. It's not even about punchlines. It's about just creating this this tension that at some point has to be relief. Like at some point all you can do

is laugh. Yeah, So there's something there. I I this clearly doesn't account for everything that's funny, you know, it doesn't account for puns and all that kind of thing. Uh It, I don't know if I can see a way that it really fits with why technology failing is all that funny? No, Yeah, I don't think. I don't think there's anything particularly insightful about this theory regarding what

we're talking about here today. Okay, here's another one. How about the adaptation, uh to signal play so that laughter would be an evolutionary adaptation that occurs when we're engaged in pretend aggression during play behaviors. It occurs as a signal to help everybody involved understand the fact the behaviors like chasing and wrestling and stuff are meant as play

rather than as genuine aggression or harm. Yeah, this one I think is important to mention here, if only for the reason that it touches on the social nature of laughter, that that laughter is also about communicating with other people regarding various threats, etcetera. Um. It's also I wonder if this is one where our storytelling has kind of kind of led us astray as well, though, because how many um individuals that actually intends harm are laughing hysterically or sardonically.

Like I'm sure it happens, I mean, and maybe one or two scenarios even come to mind where someone was did something horrible and violent and it was seen laughing, But I don't feel like it probably occurs anywhere as near as often as it does in movies where villains are constantly laughing. Be it, you know, an extreme example like the Joker, or or just any you know, you know, sardonic villain who just doing maniacally laughs while attempting to destroy the world. Uh yeah, I mean I would say

this probably does go along with the theory then. I mean, if it if somebody is laughing while they're actually attempting harm, there you know their victim is not laughing so like,

so yeah, I think this goes along there. Like and if they are, then it's like that scene in the original um what was a Little Shop of Horrors where or maybe it was in the remake is well too, where the uh, the the the the the evil dentist is going to work on this person and this person just wants it, They want the pain, and it just totally messes up his his vibe. Yeah, I haven't thought how it would accommodate the idea of like villains laughing

while they do what they do. But I mean, I think this is clearly true in some cases that people laugh during mock aggressive play behaviors. That dogs wag their tails during mock aggressive play behaviors. It's like, you know, they're growling and snarling and tumbling, but you can tell they're not really fighting because their tails are wagging. And this is a nice lead into one of one of my favorite theories, and this is one that we discussed on the show before in the past, and that's the

benign violation theory. Yeah, and this theory is very popular now. This theory proposes that humor occurs when one we perceive a way in which rules or norms of some kind are broken. And these rules can be any, you know, all kinds of things. They can be grammatical rules, they could be biological classifications, they can be the rules of making sense, they can be moral norms. Uh. And then second, we recognize that there has been a violation, but it's

not harmful, it's benign in nature. And then third we see this contradiction between the fact that there's a violation and the fact that it's harmless, and that contradiction triggers humor. Like we said, this one is very popular. It's supported by some empirical research. Just one example of research and support that I came across as a two thousand ten study in Psychological Science by McGraw and Warren called benign

violations making im moral behavior funny and too so. To just cite one example that they talk about within that study, quote, people who are more weakly committed to a norm can recognize the violation, but are less likely to be threatened or to directly experience the violation's repercussions. Consider a news story about a church that raffles off a hummer suv as part of a promotion for its members. Engaging in such a secular promotion jeopardizes the sanctity of the church.

End Although most people consider churches sacred, churchgoers should be more strongly committed to this belief than are people who

do not attend church. So the researchers looked at this and they found that while churchgoers and non churchgoers alike were about equally disgusted with this story, you know, the idea that a church would be trying to get people to join by giving them a chance to win a car, non churchgoers more often found the story humorous, and so that was like non churchgoers to churchgoers finding it humorous

was nine percent to sixty two percent. So the idea is that non churchgoers saw this as a benign violation and thus funny, and churchgoers saw it as a real harmful violation and thus not funny. Yeah, and I think that's something that's important to keep in mind. And you know, when when looking at the benign violation theory is that how ultimately subjective it is going to be. And of course that is comedy as well, so it matches up

in that regard. Right, It depends on whether you actually see something as a violation and whether you actually see something as harmful or not. Now, there are different ways you could play around with the definitions and of this theory to like, like, you could make it very elastic to accommodate a lot of stuff, or you could more narrowly tailor it. I would say one problem potentially with it is that lots of things that are benign violations

aren't funny at all. Uh. An example I came up with is, imagine you are not supposed to take home office supplies, but you do you take home a pin. Well, that's a violation of the rules. It doesn't it's not really harmful, it's benign, and it's not really funny. Right. But on the other hand, I would I think the counter argument here would be, okay, taking one pin home from work, like that's I do that all the time,

most of us do. It's one thing to take a pin home, even accidental, accidentally, take one home to you know, purposely take one home. But what have we upped it? What have instead of accidentally taking a pin home from work, you accidentally took all the pins home from work. That's funny now that it was getting into you know a little more. And I'm not saying that there's it's the funniest gag of all time, but certainly there's more room

for hilarity in this scenario. Well, that starts to be more like a machine type comedic mistake because it's so uh, it's so over the top. It seems to kind of like not just violate a norm but just plows straight through it and goes all the way down right where.

I guess another way that would work is if one meant to steal something of greater value, like one intended to to um to perpetrate some greater violation of office norms, and then in the end you only stole a pin, but even in a done land as well, and it really needs to be a box of pins or all the pins. Yeah, I guess you could say. I mean, I think you could probably play around with exactly how you define the terms of benign violation to maybe accommodate

those counter examples. I would say also though lots of things that are funny too, people can feel like they're not at all benign, and like think of videos of people falling off skateboards and smashing their faces or the crotches and the handrails and brick walls and stuff. People find these things quite funny, and people can get really

hurt in them. Yeah, I think with with that, I think part of it is that we generally see confirmation that they survived, or if we don't see confirmation that they survived whatever, they're horrible, you know, skateboarding accident was, then we at least don't see them going to the e er, you know, like we have no additional information to go on, no additional context, and we can just kind of assume that they were okay. So, and I

also was wondering about this. I wondered what extent comedic interpretations of slapstick injuries in which harm generally doesn't extend beyond the punch line. Um, if these program us to to make these kind of comedic interpretations. Uh, for instance, you know, when you think about comedic violence, you think about the Three Stooges, and certainly they're just always brutalizing each other and then they're fine, and then they're back

for another adventure. They're fine. You don't worry about their health. Take a good old fashioned three Stooges fingerpoke. Um, you know we have in the in the eye do you have two fingers and then you go right for the eyes and if nobody gets the block up, bam, there's like as more of a blank noise, right. So yeah, so when the Stooges do it, uh, it's hilarious, right, there's a lot of slapstick hilarity with with the double fingerpoke.

But and then likewise you look at something like pro wrestling, in pro wrestling, which of course is this like sports theater thing. Uh, the fingerpoke is a comedy spot, you know, it's it's if someone goes for the double eye poke, it's going to be a moment of hilarity as well. But if somebody does it in a basketball game, that's not really funny, right, or or if someone does it in most if not all combat sports, it is it

is a band maneuver. Like generally, if you're going for somebody's eyes, like that's either it's either really evil or it's a move of desperation. Yeah, this does certainly make that to whatever extent the benign violation theory is true, it's highly context dependent and and maybe the truth there, if there is something to this theory is that um is that the context makes us determine what's benign and what's not right, and it's gonna be highly dependent on

the culture you're in, the time you live in. I mean, certainly, just thinking of workplace humor, there are a lot of violations today that are serious that may have been perceived as more benign in days past, or as or seen as not violations at all. Oh yeah, this go back to like the nineteen eighties, and like workplace sexual harassment was a common like sitcom gag at the time. It's just like, oh, it's hilarious, you know, he's he's harassing

Tina again. Uh, And now like that's not really funny at all anymore because we see that, I think, I think because people see that as a more genuine violation, not as something that's just a harmless you can wave it off, that's just ted being ted. So how do you feel about about benign violation and neural networks? Well, strangely, I do see part of a fit here. Um, because I along the lines of the Church suv example. The more serious and reverent the context in which the technology

is presented, the funnier it is when it fails. I think about like ED two oh nine. This the scene is sort of made by the fact that Dick Jones and all the biz bros Are proudly boasting about this marvelous new technology that will be the future, and then

it fails in such a spectacular way. I think in general, the failures of AI are much funnier when they're presented within a context of us knowing about people who believe in AI messiahs and you know AI Basilisks and Satan's and all that who who uh see this great future of of power and dominance among Aiyes, watching them mess up in hilarious ways becomes all the more poignant and perfect. All right, time to take a quick break. Well, we will be right back. Thank alright, we're back. So one

more theory is the in congruity resolution theory. This is a theory that's had various forms over the years, for example advocated by Manuel Kant and others, but essentially the idea here is that there is an incongruity between expectations and reality. Laughter occurs when we realize this incongruity can be resolved, and this is there's clearly a strong element

of this in lots of humors. Again, what joke involves a set up and then a punch line, and most often the set up sets you up to expect one type of thing. The punch line subverts your expectations. So that's clearly there. But then again, there are lots of things that are surprising and turn our expectations on their heads, and they're not funny. Yeah, like we incongruity has to be novel. Yeah, you know, it can't be a situation where I thought I was buying mozzarella, but I really

got monster. That's not that. That's really not funny. Now, it would be funny if you thought you were buying mozzarella you got home and it was like rat eggs, especially because rats don't lay eggs. Yeah, it's like that. Yeah, that would be that would be a lot more of hilarious. One different but somewhat similar theory. I was reading about that. I'd like to read this book now that I know

it exists. It's a two thousand eleven book from M I t press called Inside Jokes by the author's Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams Reginald Adams Jr. And they argue against the sufficiency of any of these models we've talked about already. They propose instead that humor is an evolutionary reward system. It's a pleasurable reward feeling that we get when we recognize the inappropriateness of a mental representation

and then fix it. So it's the brains. It's it's an internal reward system like we get from other things that are good for the body, like eating or something. Uh. It's the brain's reward system for debugging itself. And so you can imagine this is why many jokes have a set up. The setup prepares you to establish an inappropriate or incongruous mental representation. The punch line suddenly creates that inappropriate representation, and then the debugging that immediately happens in

your brain following is rewarded with this pleasurable feeling of humor. Interesting. I think that's something that that probably matches as a model that matches with a lot of our experience of of having hilarious or ridiculous notions enter our head and then you just miss them, or you even don't, you're not even considering them, but they just rise up from

the depths of your psyche. Yeah, and I think it kind of fits well with what's funny about each entry in these like machine generated pieces of text, because each moment you're going through this text, you're sort of being set up to think about the text in a certain way given the category you're already looking for, like names of spells and stuff. Then constantly you're given something that doesn't really fit, and then your brain has to debug

why it doesn't really fit, and that feels good. I'm not sure it's a perfect theory that covers all of humor either, but I am interested in Maybe you know, another thing is that, like you said earlier, it's possible there's no single, perfect, overarching theory of humor, Like what if humor is a category held together not by a single all inclusive set of criteria, but by a Wittgensteinian kind of family resemblances principle. There's no one thing that

that all humor is. Humor is instead multiple different related sets of things, none of which are entirely contained in a single box. By the way, you know, if you open that box, it's going to be one of those spring snakes that comes flying out, Like open the fake cannon nuts. Which one does that fit in? Um? I guess you know. It has to do with expectation, but also it's benign violation. So if you're expecting nuts, not snakes,

but you've got a snake. But then, well it's not a real snake, which is a perfect animal to include in that gag given our you know, our our evolutionary response to a serpentine form. What if it's a real snake that bites you on the throat, I would like to see that happen more or what. One of my favorite gags that I did this is that a workplace at some point there was this I had to like kind of this lame boss who had a can. He had this exact gag of fake nuts, fake peanuts, and

if you opened it, a snake jumped out. Um. So one day he was gone for the day and so I took the snake, got rid of the snake, and I filled it with actual peanuts, and it gave me so much pleasure. I don't I never even got to witness the payoff. But I just love the idea of him going to like pull this out on somebody or to just amuse himself, and then it's actually filled with nuts. And I don't know how lame the boss was. This was This is kind of a time in my life

when all bosses were lame. So if any of my previous bosses are listening to me, I'm probably not talking about you. Well, there's another theory of humor that kind of fits that because of the way in which humor sort of interlocks with our expectations of people based on their individual characteristics. Uh So, the next one clearly doesn't account for everything that's funny, but it does have a kind of elegant, elegant connection to what we're talking about.

So this is a theory of humor put forward by a philosopher named Henri Bergson in a book called Laughter, published in nineteen hundred and One of the ideas Bergson puts forward here is that laughter is often our response to rigidity, inflexibility, and failure to adapt. And this is one of the reasons why comedies involve us being aware of like the particular flaws of a character and then seeing those same flaws acted out over and over again.

Think about sitcoms, like, it's not just that the characters have failures, but they tend to fail repeatedly in in individually characteristic ways. Homer Simpson is lazy, and he's thoughtless, and he's motivated by donuts and gluttony and all that. Uh. Michael Scott in the office is needy and attention seeking and unaware of how he's perceived by others. Characters have these sort of trademarks and they keep making the same kinds of mistakes over and over, and it's their inability

to adapt that makes humorous in this point of view. Now, clearly this doesn't account for everything that's funny, but it sort of ties in loosely with the Hurley Dinnett Adams theory that humor rewards adaptation and mental debugging. These people, if they're making the same mistakes over and over, they're

not debugging, and you're like debugging by watching them. But then again, of course we have to come back to sort of the benign violation theory a little bit here, because we don't want characters that uh failed too much, you know, like you don't want it to be like a tragic level of failure, right yeah. And of course in reality people fail to adapt all the all the time, and ways that aren't funny but are actually like sad or tragic or you know, it's something very bad about it.

And then there's that whole sliding scale too, because especially with something like like Michael Scott, especially like the Office got into so much awkward territory just every week, week after week, and um, a lot of that really got into sort of painful, pitiful territory, so that they definitely changed exactly where the line was in the sand, but but still ultimately, like you know, Michael Scott didn't die at the end of an episode, well, it helped by

coming back and making the character lovable, like he wasn't getting into that like sad awkwardness and then just ending in a place where you hate him, right yeah. But anyway, I think this theory about like rigidity and inflexibility and like repeating the same types of mistakes without adapting has some strong purchase on the funniest features of machine failure comedy. It's not just that the machine fails, but that the

machine fails repeatedly mechanically. According to inflexible guidelines, like the way it just keeps following the rules, when a neural net text generator spits out not just one nonsensical phrase, but like reams and reams of text without acknowledging or knowing it all that the first few words didn't make any sense. Or when I think about when a glitching video game character is stuck inside a table and just keeps running in place and talking. That's one of my favorites.

Or that lack of contacts, lack of context, lack of self awareness, and lack of adaptability. The way machines just plow ahead despite problems that are obvious to us that they're clearly not aware of. I think that's key to what makes them so especially funny. And in this sense, they're kind of like the Homer Simpsons and the Michael Scott's, the characters with inflexible, repetitive behaviors that lead to disaster

but which they never learned from or change. You know, I can't help but come back to the idea of of a child and all of this and the child analogy here, so you know we can we can laugh at our own children's mistakes are weird interpretations because we know that they're they're largely going to adapt, they're going to grow up, uh, and that they're going to leave behind their their dragons or hopefully they're just gonna remember

how to summon them in appropriate ways now. But if they're the robot is hilarious because it continues to fail, and of course also because it is a machine and not a human child. Perhaps part of the issue too, is that a machine is but a prototype, and it's next phase of advancement does not necessarily exist within itself, but in the next prototype and another individual, if you will.

I think that's a really good point. Yes, Like, so a child can make a funny mistake, but then the child immediately within themselves learn something and or you know, at least as the potential learn something and grow and get better at not making that kind of mistake anymore, which in some cases kind of tragic because the mistakes

are glorious. Oh yeah, like half the in jokes that my wife and I make are two things that my my son has not said in years, but he said it was and it was hilarious, and now we repeat it to each other. But like most of these machines, even though they might have the ability to learn from their mistakes. They learn from their their mistakes in like new instantiations of one of themselves, like you're saying, it's the next prototype. They don't automatically learn from their mistakes.

You have to do something to them to reboot them or retrain the them or something right. And if it's a video game that, yeah, this, this character is gonna keep getting stuck in that table. Maybe there'll be a patch that fixes it, but for the most part, it's going to be the sequel that tries to get it right. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. And we're back now. I think this is all one of one of the reasons that the

Black Mirror episode Metal Head from is so effective. Oh it's it's it's one of my favorites. Um this was

This was again seen. And this came after years of us watching impressive, yet ultimately clumsy and imperfect Boston Dynamics walking robot videos, videos of such you know entities as Big Dog, you know, which kind of has this springy brant kind of a sound as it prances along, and it's very impressive to look at and yet at the same time, you know their videos of being kicked around, and you know, certainly if it's succeeding a lot, but also not quite it's not reaching that level of like

mature technology. Yeah, though I worry how much I already sympathize with it, Like watching those Boston Dynamics robots when somebody kicks the dog. I know it's just a robot, but I don't like that person who kicked it. I'm like,

that's cruel. How could you do that? Well? In the Metal Head, Uh, Basically, the whole thing is kind of a post um apocalyptic scenario, killer robot scenario, and the killer robot we see is not a juvenile prototype, but what you might classify as an adult that the technology in a proceed at a perceived level of maturity. So the Boston Dynamics Big Dog all grown up into a terrifying lethal, quadrupedal killing machine that it overcomes every challenge in the natural or man made world that it is

presented with. Uh. And I think that's that's one of the reasons it is terrifying, because it's kind of like, oh, yeah, these things are going to grow up. We're for a lot of money and effort into making them grow up, and uh and and how are we going to relate to that technology when it reaches that point? Well, that brings us back to something you were saying earlier about like the CS Lewis quote, Like clearly our machines and their failures I think are becoming much funnier over time.

Like a steam engine designed to pump water out of a coal mine is really not funny when it malfunctions, maybe like cut somebody's arm off, like it's it's not hilarious. Automatic doors are still not very funny. Maybe a little bit funnier, like I was saying, when they're trying to close on something over and over, and you know when it gets repetitive like that room buzz are funnier. Anything attempting to generate real human language or simulate direct human behaviors,

like say the DARPA challenge bipedal robots. You know when you watch them like collapsing in the sand, or like when one of them like opens a door and the door goes open and then they just crumple in a heap on the ground and that kind of thing. It is definitely even funny to hear, like machines seem to get funnier. The closer they get too resembling real human behaviors, the better they simulate. And I wonder, so it's almost like there's an uncanny Valley of humor in a way. Yeah,

I think uncanny valley definitely gets into this territory. I'm specifically reminded of Sophia, the smiling humanoid robot. It's becomes something of a meme and it's very impressive, like that's the thing. At the same time it is amazing, like this thing we be worshiped as a god in the previous dage that it smiles too fast, smiles too fast, and it's just it's not right, and you can't help but either look away or laugh. But yeah, I mean,

I wonder if there there is an element. I don't think it's the whole thing, but I do wonder if it's there's sort of an undercurrent in machine humor, of a kind of nervous laughter at you know, in machines potentially becoming more human, more threatening to our sense of species specialness, and potentially more threatening to our safety. Like we were talking about, you know, I'm reminded of something

we mentioned fairly often on the show. Actually, ever since our conversation with our Scott Baker about this about how you don't need terminators or matrix agents or other evil super intelligent villains who want to exterminate humans for AI

to represent a threat to humanity. In fact, I'm much more worried about the threat from stupid AI that is powerful before it is wise, sort of like the way that so many examples we've discussed already just plow ahead carrying out their functions without realizing they're going the wrong way, or they're they're stuck, or they're not making any sense.

Uh like attached that kind of logic to practical functions that have power over our lives, and there can be terrible consequences, which also kind of comes back to children. It's like, these are the these are the humans that will one day rule the world, and uh and just listen to the weird things that keep saying to us, right, Yeah, well, I guess there's always kind of a terror at the upcoming generations in there because there's always a little bit

of lack of understanding. Oh yeah, for sure, I mean kids are always going to be amusing, but also, yeah, you want you wonder, you know, if they're going to be able to really grow out of this, and then likewise, teenagers are always going to be terrifying to the older generations, right well, So bringing it back to neural networks generating text, one of the things that I see come up most often in like articles about the subject is fears about

machine generated news articles, like specifically machine generated fake news or hoax news articles. Of course, I'm not talking about the version of fake news that has become a politicized term. I mean like articles that are generated to contain false information, right, even intentionally uh created it's a propaganda or misinformation, yeah, or just nonsense. And so it shouldn't come as a shock that they're already programs that can and do right

fake articles from AI generated text. The problem is not that these programs exist like humans, right, hoax and propaganda articles all the time. It's not that we couldn't create them without machines. My fear is maybe about volume. Like, if the process of putting out hoax nonsense articles and stuff can be automated, you can just do so much of it. And one of the keys is that it doesn't have to be good or convincing to be damaging.

If you simply flood the zone of people's Internet experience with obvious nonsense and trash, they don't have to believe it.

It can just do lots of damage to a culture simply by flooding out everything else, right, I mean you can you can almost imagine a future generation looking back at a time like that and saying, well, you know, it's really difficult to know exactly what they've they felt in thought because of all the nonsense that was created, say, not not just textual but video nonsense, photoshop nonsense like wh where are the real people and their actual concerns

and all of this. Yeah, I really worry about the the potential for dumb, context ignorant algorithms that seemed perfectly capable of steering user is intellectably into more and more horrible in mind destroying content on platforms like YouTube, you know, and YouTube content serving algorithms that's already the world destroying AI. But here's the thing, Joe, what if it's all funny?

What if it's all really funny? Well, in some cases it is like top shelf ClickHole funny, Then then I don't know, maybe them all in for the age of unreasoned. I worry about this more than the kind of mind ravaging dumb ai, way more than I worry about the great basilisk I agree with you there. All right, Well, well I want to bring it back to lighter territory here.

Uh the joke telling capabilities of Siri on an iPhone. Now, imagine anyone out there who has an iPhone and probably there's some degree of this in any kind of you know, voice interface system, Alexa or or what have you. But when you when you ask Serri to tell you a knockdot joke, she will tell you a knockdoc joke, and some of them are pretty funny. Um, and then she'll you you ask her other things so they'll be a hilarious response. Like if you ask her about how nine

thousand she has a funny response that's you know, preprogrammed. Again, it's it's something that somebody wrote and created. This is human human augmented humor. Yeah. But one of my favorites is is one that Siri told me where clearly it was there was an error that took place, and I'm not perfectly replicating it here, but it was something like this, uh,

knock knock. I say who's there? And then Siri says Sophia, And I say Sophia, who, and then she says, I'm sorry, there's nobody in your call list or your contact listen Sophia. And so I never get to find out what the rest of that joke is because in asking, in responding to the knock knock joke, she thinks I'm trying to make a call. And so that that makes me laugh every time that I've heard it. That's really good. It's

like a performance art kind of joke. Yeah. So it's it's trying to be, you know, actual funny joke telling, but then it gets into this machine error level of joke telling, and it's probably the more hilarious outcome of the two. There is no one called big Cat, big Cat, big Cat, big Cat in your address, but there should be that I should create that. All right, Well, there you have it. Um, I feel like we have completely explained humor and artificial intelligence. We hope you never find

anything funny again. Uh yeah, as so. As always, if you want more content, you want more episodes of stuff to blow your mind, head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the episodes. That's where we'll find links out to social media accounts. That's where we'll find a link to our t shirt store where you can get the all Hail the Great Basilist t shirt. Uh.

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