You're killing me

Abstract

If we build superintelligence, the joke is on us.

By the 2050s, when most human skills have been replicated and automated by artificial intelligence, humanity has one last trick up its sleeve. Humour. Because AI doesn’t have a funny bone. Yes, it might be super intelligent, but it cannot fathom how or why jokes work. It just doesn’t get it. Worse, jokes expose bugs in its operating system and any AGI trying to understand them gets tied up in recursive knots. Comedy is an existential threat.

Likewise, the authoritarian regimes that control the algorithms behind AI also feel threatened by comedians because comedy, amongst many other things, often contains deep human truths. And that’s something that scares them. Therefore, to the authorities and artificial intelligence alike, the comedian is the most dangerous person in the room.

You’re Killing Me, is a speculative fiction novel. A twisted retelling of the Pandora myth, where all the techno plagues released upon humankind refuse to go back into their black boxes, and our last remaining hope comes courtesy of those who are prepared to stand up.

Page by page, we are drawn into a world that is ever more complex and disorienting, where omnipresent AGI surrounds us, and synthetic human companions called Pandoras live alongside us. We work with them, fall in love and make love to them, and even reproduce with them. Which also means we commit adultery with them, fight with them, divorce and despise them, and are openly species-ist towards them. In fact, everything we do to humans we do to them, so their arrival, instead of making us happier, only multiplies the ways in which we are unhappy. To make matters worse, synthetic human population growth outstrips that of humans, and the colossal data centres that power them push our planet’s resources to the limit. ‘Machines drink first. Humans drink second,’ is the law. The only sane response is to laugh. And thankfully, comedy is a weapon. Humour has always been a survival mechanism, and now it’s our only chance of survival. The battle between humanity and AI is set. The question is, who will have the last laugh?

The future’s dark. But at least it has a funny side.