artificial intelligence
...f humor be taught? To a human, perhaps it can be, but whether a good sense of humor can be taught to a computer is doubtful. Where our technology lies today there is little chance of computers replicating true human emotion (Beale 45). As our world simultaneously shrinks and expands through the growing abilities and applications of computers in our everyday lives, it seems that the role of the computer has been reversed. Before we knew that the computer only understood what we programmed it to understand; however, now the majority of our society is learning more from computers than they are able to input into it. As stated, it only seems that the roles are being reversed, because somewhere far down at the beginning of the line someone is programming the computer. However, a transition is occurring among computer programmers, as they attempt to create machines that learn rather than machines that must be programmed. It has become the hope of many engineers that the "mechanisms of human thought could be precisely modeled and simulated on a computer". This is known as Artificial Intelligence (Artificial 3). Artificial Intelligence, or AI, since its conception, has grown from a dozen researchers, to thousands of engineers and specialists; from programs capable of playing checkers, to systems designed to diagnose disease (Dumm 4). With all that the computer is learning now a new question arises: How long before a computer can learn to understand and execute the attributes of a good sense of humor? It is believed that the theory of AI has existed long before recorded, but was not made conceivable until the invention of the electronic computer in 1941 (Dreyfus 6). Since then many scientists and engineers have been working on a way to make the computer more human. Once it was noticed that the computer could perform simple tasks such as mathematical problems and memory recall much faster than humans the idea began that they should become more like us (Beale 2). However after almost sixty years scientists have still not been able to create AI in the sense that they had hoped. Even the Intelligence that they have given computers, which at the time was considered a triumph in reaching towards AI, is no longer considered valid(Kurzweil 14-16). This includes such...