HAL Is OK, but Can He Write Humor?

Being virtually an illiterate about computers and their capacities, my skepticism about their unbounded future is meaningless. Besides, since the moon walk I have come to believe that anything technology undertakes to do is possible.

However, I still have my doubts that computers can learn to read and write in any imaginative or creative way. Richard O’Reilly, our computer expert, wrote in The Times the other day that science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of an all-knowing, voice-activated HAL computer system by the year 2001 (the first year of the 21st Century) is unlikely.

Nevertheless, he went on to say, IBM recently previewed NewSelector, a program that can scan a newspaper story, and determine which of its subscribers, whose profiles it has, would be interested in the story.

“To do so, NewSelector had to take apart the news story word by word and sentence by sentence in a process known as parsing. Then it had to match the meaning of those words and sentences to the interests of its subscribers.”

Pretty good, but not good enough to persuade me that computers will soon be writing poetry and love letters (if anyone does any more) and, least of all, humor.

In “The Blind Watchmaker,” the British zoologist Richard Dawkins notes that his computer has a storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes (one byte holds one character of text); but the brain with which we read his words has some 10 million kiloneurones. “Many of these billions of nerve cells have each more than a thousand ‘electric wires’ connecting them to other neurones. Moreover, at the molecular genetic level, every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely coded digital information as my entire computer. . . .”

So there appears to be almost no comparison between the capacity of the brain and the capacity of the computer.

Computers of course can perform miraculous mathematical calculations, and their ability for translating one language to another is rapidly improving. So I am not denying that in a sense they are mechanical brains.

Perhaps computers will be able to translate “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” from English into Tagalog, or already can; but I doubt that one could ever write Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major, the love scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” or Henny Youngman’s joke: “Take my wife. Please.”

The joke might be the hardest of all for a computer to come up with. How can a computer be taught to recognize the especially cynical meaning of “Please,” in that context?

How could a computer be taught to write a paragraph like this one, (as I remember it) from S.J. Perelman: “He went groveling in the dirt. After gathering a basket full of grovels. . . .”

Or this Perelman paragraph: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--I love the editors of Time, the weekly news magazine, all two hundred of them, and I don’t care who knows it. I’d willingly snuggle in their arms till homeward came the cows while someone in snowy flannels plunked out ‘Carolina Moon’ on a round-bellied mandolin.”

How could a computer be trained to write “homeward came the cows” (except by a Time editor), or to think of anyone playing “Carolina Moon” on a round-bellied mandolin?

A smart computer might be able to scan a newspaper story to determine which subscribers it would interest, but I doubt that a computer could even fathom the headlines of most newspapers. They are often written with a conscious or unconscious humor that defies logical comprehension.

Take this one, for example, from the Detroit Free Press: “POLICE CAN’T STOP GAMBLING.” Does that mean that the police can’t stop criminal gambling, or that they can’t give up gambling themselves?

Or this one from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “CARIBBEAN ISLANDS DRIFT TO LEFT.” Does this mean that the Caribbean Islands are moving to the left politically, or geographically?

Or this one from the New York Times: “SUSPECT HELD IN KILLING OF REPORTER FOR VARIETY.” Does that mean that the reporter worked for Variety, or that the suspect killed him just to be doing something different?

And this one, from the Contra Costa Times, would surely throw a computer: “GREEKS FINE HOOKERS.” Does that mean that Greek courts are making hookers pay fines, or that Greek hookers are excellent?

It ain’t easy.