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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Meson Filter | ||
| Provides robots with the ability to tell the difference between jokes that provide a chuckle and jokes that provide a belly laugh. |
Lester the Jester decides to test his new robot comedian Rupert.
| "Hey, Rupert, tell me a joke."
Rupert's mouth opened. His voice clacked out, rising and falling like a sine wave. "On what subject, sir?" The Rholg's mechanic leaned across his flat purple chest. "That's another gimmick - a meson filter. You said you wanted him to be able to distinguish between laugh-power in different gags so he could fit them to the audience. And price was no object. That's all you have to tell a tech. They knocked themselves out developing a gadget to do the job just right..." |
| Technovelgy from The Jester,
by William Tenn. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Rupert the robot comedian is also a very early example of a machine that is able to laugh - in this case, at his own jokes:
"That's another bug the techs didn't have time to clean up. Comes from the meson filter. Near as we can figure out it's what they call an aftereffect of his capacity to distinguish between gags that are partly funny and gags that are very funny. Electronic differentiation of the grotesque, as it says in the specifications - in man, a sense of humor. 'Course in a robot, it only means there's a kink in the exhaust."
Compare to Mycroft Holmes, the computer humorist from Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
The robot, standing perfectly immobile, was clacking wildly, grinding his gears and pinging his wires as if he were coming apart.
('The Jester' by William Tenn)
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and Technology from The Jester
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and Technology by William Tenn
Tech news articles related to The Jester
Tech news articles related to works by William Tenn
Meson Filter-related
news articles:
- Pathways Language Model (PaLM) Is No Joke
| Should AIs and AI Robots Demand Rights? |
| Robot Learns Human Tool Usage By Imitation Learning |
| Companion Caregiver ChatGPT Dolls |
| LLM 'Cognitive Core' Now Evolving |
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
