Irish Examiner View: Artificial intelligence has us raging against the machines

Artificial intelligences lack humour — for the next few years at least.

Using a self-service machines at Tesco Mahon Point, Cork. Picture Dan Linehan

Many of us have protested the relentless, frequently unthinking onward march of automation being ushered into our lives by technocrats.

From the supermarkets that force you to self-serve, to the soulless voice prompts when you try to phone a bank, to the chatbots that pop up to give you bland answers when visiting websites, this is a rabbit hole from which we must escape.

While the rebellion is growing, there is always a danger of another counter revolution. 

Some scientists believe they know what the problem is in our relationships with machines and robots. The artificial intelligences lack humour. And that is true, they do.

Now researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University are training robots about appropriate laughter, and the difference between a chuckle and a side-splitter. 

Authors and scriptwriters have understood the problem of empathy for many years. Hal 9000 didn’t have enough of it in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic 2001, although his comment that “it just happens to be an unalterable fact that I am incapable of being wrong” sounds suspiciously human to us.

Marvin the paranoid android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy emoted too much. He had been built with a Genuine People Personality and suffered accordingly from depression.

In Klara and the Sun by the Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, genetically engineered children are coached socially by “artificial friends” who may eventually take their place. In Machines Like Me, the Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan posits a love triangle involving two humans and a robot.

Koji Inoue, assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology in Kyoto, wants to help machines to understand not only when to laugh, but how to laugh. He and his colleagues believe this may take up to 20 years.

So, we have two decades ahead of us before a scanner says: “Unexpected item in the bagging area. No, only messin’!”