They're drone-striking Afghanistan for us.
They're replacing us on the assembly line at the Hostess plant. They're even cutting into our aortas during life-or-death surgery. But can robots master one of the most mysterious—and quintessentially human—skills of them all: making people laugh?
Meet Data, the world's first stand-up-comedy bot.
About 200 plaid-shirted tech evangelists are packed into a conference room here in the Austin Convention Center—the primary hub of the massive annual SXSW Interactive Festival—at the rather unfunny and all-too-sober hour of 4 p.m. to see some stand-up comedy. For most greenhorn performers, this would make for intimidating circumstances. But Data, the comic we're here to see, is a robot. And as he quickly reminds us, he's evolved beyond human nerves.
"I would like to say it is a pleasure to be here," he churrs mechanically, his half-dollar-sized eyes framed by beady green lights. "But I'm a robot and know no emotion."
Even by robot standards, Data is especially stern-looking. He's small—only two feet tall—and built like a mini stormtrooper: gleaming white, with a shiny breastplate and a glowing insignia on his chest. He's clearly not trying to pass for human like Jude Law in A.I. or Roxxxy, the world's first sexbot programmed to respond to human touch, who weirdly looks exactly like a limp-mouthed Peggy Bundy. Right now Data is perched on a table so that his mouth—a small, perfectly circular hole in his plastic exterior— can reach the mike, like a toddler on a step stool at the sink.
"Take a good look," he invites the assembled techies—all of whom, incidentally, are dressed like the fifth member of Mumford & Sons—as he pans his head across the room with the mechanical glide of a lobby security camera. His voice is halting and tinny, not unlike one of those answer bots you get when you call your bank's customer-service line at 2 a.m., and he does the robot-y thing where he emphasizes random, incorrect syllables—"superhero" becomes "su-per-her-o.""They call me Data the robot. Gosh, I love saying that. It makes me feel like some kind of su-per-her-o!" The crowd chuckles. Data lifts his arms out to each side in what seems like a shrugging gesture. "But actually, I'm just a mediocre robotic comedian."
Data's programmer, a very pretty, very pregnant young robotics expert from Carnegie Mellon University named Heather Knight, sits on a chair behind him during his routine. Minutes into his set, he introduces her. "My programmer designs my presentations with the goal of driving innovation and social robotics," he whirs, "which is the integration of robot helpers into everyday life." He pauses theatrically for a few beats, then adds, "So you might as well get used to this, right, guys?"
This one gets a good laugh from the crowd. The robot's timing isn't bad. He waits until the laughter dies down, then continues. "Social intelligence is so complex that many humans are not good at it. Any pro-gram-mers or engineers in the house?" About a third of the audience members offer whooo's of affirmation.
"I rest my case."
A big laugh this time.
"Using your feedback, Heather hopes that one day I will become an autonomous robotic performer." He takes a breath. "Like Kevin Costner."
The room erupts into laughter. A few people even clap.
For a moment, Data's eyes appear to glow a little brighter. He seems pleased with himself.
"Or perhaps Charlie Sheen is a better choice?"
There's a reason no one says, "Man, I saw Chris Rock at a club last night. He was absolutely robotic!" Ruthless efficiency is seriously unfunny. So it comes as something of a relief when Heather Knight tells me that her intent is not to turn Data into the T-1000 of robot stand-ups, sent on a mission to obliterate human comics. She views Data more as an envoy for robomanity. "The goal is that one day in the future we can have a companion robot that doesn't piss us off all the time," she explains. "One that we like hanging out and spending time with." Basically, she wants us all to be friends. Because in the future, according to Knight and her fellow social roboticists, man and machine will not only work together but also trust each other. And comedy, she figures, is such a uniquely human form of endearment that if robots can begin to master it, it'll be a crucial step in deepening our connection to them.
After Data's routine, we all walk out together into the main convention center. Knight is cradling him on her hip the way moms in the Midwest hoist around their toddlers, and Data's robo-paws are grazing her baby bump. As we go down the escalator, two women passing us going the opposite way spot Knight, her stomach, and the tiny robot clinging to her side. "Aww," one of them calls out. "Cute robot baby!"
Where his comic career is concerned, Data is still in his infancy. He's been performing about once a month for the past year, keeping his set time maxed out at eight minutes. Currently he has a database with more than 200 jokes, which Knight wrote with help from established comedians, including Rob Delaney, Reggie Watts, and Marc Maron. They also helped her program Data's pretty incredible (for a robot, at least) sense of timing. And his "sense of self." Most of Data's jokes are about being a robot. "If a comedian gets up with alopecia universalis," says Watts, "one of the first things he's going to have to mention is, 'Yes, I have no hair on my body.' So if it's a robot, it needs to talk about being a robot."
Data's real killer app, though, is being able to read his audience—in some cases, even better than a human comic. Or at the very least, more precisely. By measuring applause and volume levels, Data can tell in milliseconds how funny the audience thought his joke was relative to his previous ones and then select his next joke based on that response. Let's say the live-audience response to a knock-knock joke about chickens is underwhelming. He'll note that the crowd was not pleased and cue up a joke that's longer and differently paced, or one that's slightly more risqué, to see if the crowd likes it better. "He has sensors about himself, so there's the reflective 'self-awareness,' " Knight explains. "He's always 'thinking,' How am I being perceived by other people?"
Some comics aren't perceiving him so well. "I was at this comedy festival in Amsterdam last year," she recalls, "and there was, like, another comedian backstage who was totally threatened by the robot. You know, saying, 'This is not fair! She has a robot! That's cheating!' " At this point, that anxiety seems disproportionate to Data's abilities. But over the long term, perhaps it's a valid concern. "I can see a robot standing in front of a crowd, looking at faces—probably a lot like the way they're scanning license plates on the interstate now—and very rapidly reading the room and accurately predicting the emotional state of its audience," says Bruce Duncan, the team leader of a privately commissioned humanoid robot called Bina48. "Humans are incredibly perceptive, but we're still pretty oblivious to a lot of the information that we're observing and reacting to." In the next few decades, Duncan contends, a robot comic could become completely autonomous, drawing from an "encyclopedic knowledge of human humor" to deliver jokes that are winners every time.
Comedy, like sex and Taco Bell, is one of those things that gets less fun the more you analyze it. But when you're assessing whether a robot could someday be a truly great comedian, you do start to ruminate on how it all works. The word humor is derived from the Latin umores, meaning body "fluids," the right proportion of which was thought to elevate the human mind to a state of joy and gaiety. This was back in the fourteenth century, when we really didn't know shit about anything.
But even then, the one part they had right was that comedy requires a human body. The most potent humor comes from the experience of being human, usually the not-so-good experiences. A great recent example occurred last summer when the comedian Tig Notaro walked onstage at Largo in Los Angeles and shared the news she had learned just the day before: "Good evening, hello. I have cancer. How are you?" And people laughed. Humor is just one of those uniquely human attributes—akin to the ability to fall in love or develop an insatiable addiction to Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
But maybe that won't be true much longer.
Onstage with Data and Knight at SXSW is Peter McGraw, head of the University of Colorado Boulder's Humor Research Lab, or HuRL. McGraw seems proud of the fact that comedians don't especially like him, because he's the guy who's trying, literally, to reduce what they do to a science.
"If we can map the human genome, if we can create nuclear energy, we can understand how and why humor arises," McGraw insists.
According to McGraw's scientific theory of comedy, all humor—every single joke—can be boiled down to one rule: Jokes work when they achieve what he calls "a benign violation"—when some societal or moral norm we have is violated, but in a way that feels permissible to us. Sarah Silverman, for instance, often starts with a violation, but as McGraw describes it, "she sort of does this nonthreatening, cute act" to help neutralize the tone. It makes her joke funny rather than legally actionable. Whereas Jerry Seinfeld always starts with an everyday, benign scenario and then points out everything that's wrong with it. I mean, what is the deal with organic blueberries?
Comics tend not to agree with McGraw's theory of comedy, mostly because theories of comedy really annoy comics. "You have to take into consideration the power of humor and where humor comes from, which is the human heart and the human brain," says Maron. "I don't think it can be programmed." Here's a thought experiment: Imagine if Wolf Blitzer memorized every word of Louis C.K.'s saddest-hand-job-in-America riff—a now-classic bit of sexual misery—imitating Louis's demeanor and timing perfectly. It would be funny, sure. But nowhere near as funny as Louis performing it. Because to some unavoidable degree, reciting someone else's comedy is like wearing someone else's skin.
Although it would make Wolf Blitzer more relatable, which is Knight's real goal with Data anyway. The more you talk to people who are working to make robots funnier and more personable—in a word, more like us—the more you realize that humans aren't so hard to mimic after all. Most of our daily interactions aren't stand-up acts. They're more along the lines of chitchat, jokes told around the watercooler. And while these grand experiments in robot comedy may not end with Louie C-3PO selling out Radio City Music Hall, they will make our daily interactions with robots a bit less sterile, a bit more recognizably human—so that someday, when you ask Siri, "Are you funny?" she'll come back with something a lot more clever than how she responds now: "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't answer that."
This may have occurred to you already, but Knight's Data is named after Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the USS Enterprise's resident robot. Show-runner Gene Roddenberry once said he wanted the character to become more and more like a human as the series wore on.
Humor, though, is the one thing Star Trek's Data never really masters. In an early-season episode, he tries telling a joke to the engineer about a man going to the store to buy kidneys. The engineer's verdict: The joke is "too old. And you didn't tell it very well."
Data isn't wounded. "How do you know when something's funny?"
"You just do," the engineer says.
At this point in comedy-robot Data's existence, he doesn't have a sense of humor, either—his humor is really Knight's humor. She writes his jokes. And Knight, for the record, does not work blue. The most risqué joke I will witness Data telling merely insinuates that Knight might be cheating on him. The bit doesn't get a laugh, exactly, but it gets something much more valuable.
"I think I might be about to break up with my programmer," Data confesses. "I caught her watching videos of other robots. I don't feel pain, but that does compute." The few chuckles in the crowd are drowned out by a wave of sympathetic awww's. This is how it begins.
Check out Data at a 2011 TED Talk >
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