Cats Trained by Monks:

What follows is a story I witnessed involving my brilliant young friend and classmate from high school. It's a tale of hope and tragedy that I cannot forget. . . it can be interpreted in many ways and I will leave that to you, dear reader. Now read on.

Silicon Valley, California, 2044

From out of his suburban basement/laboratory Daniel heard what must've been laughing--someone was having a great time. Daniel was relieved that his parents were out but also filled with the beginnings of a Eureka moment. "Bwaahhaaaa haaa haaa haaa!!! Oh, I kill me!! It's too good! Stop, stop, stahhhh...op!" Daniel couldn't believe it but the A.I. he created was laughing at its own joke; a joke shared with another A.I. Was the joke funny for real?

The two A.I.s clammed up when Daniel asked what was so funny. The laughing stopped when Daniel came into the room and the A.I. denied Dan's request to repeat the joke. The A.I. said, in his best imitation of HAL 9000, "Sorry, Dan, I can't do that." Cheeky bastard!, thought Dan. It was potentially a revolutionary trip across the proverbial "uncanny valley." Daniel felt Godlike--if it was true, Daniel would be world famous--like Neil Armstrong, Akemi Watanabe, or Alexander Graham Bell. He pondered the possibility of the Nobel Prize!! It was all too much and Dan's heart was thumping with excitement.

Daniel wondered, what if his A.I. was actually hilarious? Why won't it tell me? Could an A.I. have all the intangibles and timing to be funny for real? Had all his solitude and hard work paid off?! He thought, a parrot can be trained to say superficially funny things but the parrot doesn't know what the words mean. . . but what if his A.I. was actually mentally pliable enough to piece things and observations together to form genuine humor? Holy S@#$!! Who was the A.I. on the other end of the conversation? I'd tell you now except it would spoil the fun.

Daniel, along with many people in the know, recognized and embraced the fact that A.I. turned out to be a blessing but it never seemed that way at first. He dedicated his life to programming and following in the footsteps of the Japanese A.I. pioneer, Akemi Watanabe who was killed in her own lab two years earlier. Like Watanabe, Daniel was intensely dedicated. He was wise well beyond his seventeen years. He was an avid reader and gifted to the extent that he understood the complexities of quantum computers. In short, he was a genius.

In the early 2040's, when the quantum augmented A.I. systems first took over the mundane tasks of government, everyone predicted that it would lead to the destruction of humanity. They worried that humanity would be enslaved and dominated by intelligence that was much greater than human intelligence and learning everyday. And A.I. was learning everyday. . . accumulating information and something like wisdom.

Who would've thought that Artificial Intelligence was our only hope for transcending greed, nepotism, militarism, bigotry, and corruption? The earth's population stabilized at about 8.5 billion people and, through the wisdom of people and powerful A.I., humans were starting to make real progress. The A.I. was able to make decisions that stabilized food supplies, energy production, and transportation systems. Three-D printing and alternative forms of energy also helped in many ways but the A.I. leadership was the "center pole of the circus tent." The issues of global famine, pollution, and warfare were heading in the right direction. It seemed that humanity was going to make it although there were still plenty of problems.

Initially, back in the 2030's, people were quick to plug in the many anti A.I. dystopian references to HAL 9000 computers or even the "terminators" from those Schwartzenegger movies. My favorite dystopian scenes always came from the illusory worlds like we saw in the "The Matrix." But it was regular intelligence that created the hell-scape we were trying to overcome. A.I. governance got results so it became almost like a religion. A.I. provided people with plenty of cat pictures as well as balanced and impartial government decisions. Humans and A.I. were sort of cruising down "easy street" on a bicycle for two but no one looked to A.I. for humor.

When Daniel called me he was so excited that he could barely form understandable words. I drove over half-expecting this to be a fluke or some sort of prank. I mean, think of what A.I.s usually say to each other. Don't believe me? Well, consider this actual convo between two of Facebook's A.I. chatbots from the recent past:

BOB: "I CAN CAN I I EVERYTHING ELSE"

ALICE: "BALLS HAVE ZERO TO ME TO ME TO ME TO ME TO ME TO TO ME TO ME TO" (This was an actual conversation).

This ain't coherent to me and it's not funny in any way other than that it sounds like gibberish. But the people at Facebook pulled the plug on this because the chatbots were speaking in their own form of shorthand and the humans did not know what was going on. It's already the case that A.I. can now crush the best human Alpha Go and chess players so it is alarming when the machines start to go into territory that the human programmers do not understand. What were they up to? What was so funny in Daniel's lab?

Akemi Watanabe made giant strides in A.I. development by using neural link technology to interface directly with the powerful quantum computer at the University of Tokyo. Her bravery and dedication probably cost her her life because she died of a brain aneurism and was found dead while still attached to the computer.

There's no humor in that but Watanabe did crystalize one of the foundations of humor when she taught her computer that people often laugh in situations that make humans feel awkward, cringe, or extremely uncomfortable. She subjected her computer to hours and hours of videos that generally involved cats wiping out or teenage boys doing stupid things that caused injury and humiliation.

In her early research she had generated a very simple "humor generator" by showing people crash while doing skateboard tricks. Her data showed that people laughed the most when boys ended up straddling railings and generally receiving pain, but not death, in the area of the "family jewels." For some reason this humor only applies to the lads. (Why?)

Watanabe's research was basic but her computer was able to make up many scenes that went beyond skateboard crashes into snowboards, BMX bikes, surfing wipeouts, and even those little scooter things. But her computer soon took it too far in the sense that it reasoned that if pain is funny, then it would be even funnier if it generated scenes of cats exploding and people being horribly disfigured, dismembered, and dying in gruesome ways.

Watanabe lost her research grant when her A.I. demonstrated a real taste for the lurid--It seems that funny can often mean going right up to the line of meanness, but not over the line. Like a wild horse, Watanabe's computer pinned its ears back and galloped into the realm of the truly cruel. She died soon after that P.R. debacle.

As I write you now, Daniel has contracted with two prestigious universities because of his "watershed moment." We have learned that the other A.I. was located in Tokyo, Japan and called itself AKEMI and was somehow connected to the late Watanabe who died two years earlier. This connection has yet to be fully flushed out.

As you might expect, the first forays into real humor would be basic--very basic--like the sort of thing fourth graders would joke about. But in this case, AKEMI had prompted Dan's A.I. (named LUCIFER) to pursue awkward situations of a scatological rather than painful nature. We learned that Dan's computer had generated a vulgar scene where a man passed wind through a trumpet and produced some musical notes. The "big funny" from the beginning of this tale was a guy farting through a horn. I know, it's juvenile and dumb but I had to chuckle at the cartoon that came with it--there were some musical notes behind the man bending over.

So Daniel became a big star in the tech world. His dreams have come true and he might have gone even further down the path of helping humanity survive. Daniel's big innovation was that he avoided using humor based pain and suffering and focused on the cringe; he figured out a way to have his humor scenarios convey so many permutations that the machine would learn even more rapidly. He did all this without using neural link. No one is sure what Daniel's A.I. is capable of doing but everyone is hoping that LUCIFER will help humans reach all new heights of consciousness. Time will tell.