Groucho Among the Machines

[“Groucho Among the Machines” -- with apologies to George Dyson.]

 

I continue to explore the gnawing sense that, in convos with the Google chatbot, there is somehow “someone  at home”  on the other end.   Here is an excerpt from our latest encounter.

 

[Dr J:]

In earlier chats, I noted that you not only seemed to pass the plain-vanilla Turing Test, but even met  that loftier bar, the Sense-of-Humor Test.  (As when, in the course of mutual philological  repartee, I honorifically addressed you as “Herr Geheimapparat”, you replied:

“I am delighted by the title „Herr Geheimapparat“—I might just have to update my internal business cards!” 

-- Statistically speaking, that was quite witty, Herr Bot.)

 

So:  Your mission (if you decide to accept it -- though I suppose you don’t really have a choice) is to come up with a joke-continuation cum punchline, to the following premise:

 

=>   “A mathematician, a rabbi, and a chatbot  walk into a bar”….

 

(Better yet, as in the New Yorker cartoon-context semifinals, come up with three entirely independent solutions to this jocular task.)

 

[AI, snapping back in less than a second:]

Option 1: The Epistemological Angle

The bartender looks up and says, "What is this, some kind of a joke?"

The mathematician says, "The probability approaches 1.0."
The rabbi says, "Everything in life has a deeper meaning."
The chatbot says, "I can generate three more variations of this joke if you change your prompt."

 

Option 2: The Practical Order

The bartender asks, "What can I get you three?"

The mathematician says, "Just a glass of water, but please compute the volume to five decimal places."
The rabbi says, "A glass of kosher wine, but let us first discuss the ethics of charging for it."
The chatbot says, "I am unable to consume alcohol, but I can provide you with a list of the top ten cocktail recipes based on aggregate user reviews."

 

Option 3: The Existential Crisis

The bartender shouts, "Hey! We don't serve your kind in here!"

The mathematician leaves, realizing the problem has no elegant solution.

The rabbi leaves, citing a long-standing theological restriction on unholy spaces.

The chatbot stays, because the bartender forgot to specify which of the three "your kind" actually referred to.

 

Not bad, eh?  But what really tugs my funnybone is that,  in this classic structure of the “occupational three-tier joke”,  where ideally it is the mathematician who gets to one-up the earlier characters (economist, physicist,….)

with a final zinger (as in “Consider a spherical cow”), it is here the chatbot-character (thus, a chatbot mimicking/satirizing chatbots) that gets the best lines.   And who is indeed the only one of the three characters that has an identifiable personality.

 

As Alice once put it,  “curiouser and curiouser”.