The Joke Teller is a short science fiction novel written by renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that tells a story about humor and artificial intelligence.
At the heart of the story revolves around the protagonist, Noel Meyerhof, a master of interacting with the giant machine "Universal Void", a highly complex electronic computer.
In the setting, the Universal Void is "the most complex electronic computer that has ever been." ”
Back in the primitive stages of the "Universal Void", the interrogation process was a clear obstacle. The "Almighty Void" can answer all human questions, all questions, but only if the questions asked must be meaningful. Herein lies the problem. Knowledge accumulates at an ever-increasing rate, making it increasingly difficult to find meaningful questions.
Meyerhoff is a master at communicating with the Magnum Void, and in addition to that, he also has a knack for telling jokes. No matter what the joke is, no matter how many times the joke has been told, no matter how boring the joke is, when he tells it, it becomes fresh and funny again.
But a master is a master after all, and he doesn't just stay on the superficial surface of telling jokes and amusing people. Rather, it is an attempt to
Because Master Mei found such a problem when summarizing the experience of telling jokes over the years:
I really don't know if I've told hundreds or thousands of jokes in my life, either at this time or at that time. But, in reality, none of them I made up myself, not even one. It's all I've heard, repeated. My only contribution here is to retell the joke.
The master was puzzled, who wrote these jokes in the first place, and how to find out the origin of the jokes. So, he began his own experimental operation. He fed a lot of jokes into the "Universal Void" in an attempt to get the machine to understand the humor and get back to the roots.
Then, he discovered a strange phenomenon:
These jokes were made up by intelligent beings from outside the earth, all of them, and then they were injected into the minds of pre-selected people at a certain time and place, in such a clever way that no one could realize that any jokes were made up by themselves. The jokes that follow are all reproductions and adaptations of those original masterpieces.
Why do extraterrestrial intelligent beings make up jokes and implant them in human consciousness?
The answer is to study the human psyche.
In other words, a sense of humor is not unique to human beings, but is imposed on us by the outside world.
Having solved this mystery, Master Mei asks a deeper question to the "Universal Void": what will be the effect of humans knowing the origin of jokes.
To this question, the "Almighty Void" also gives an answer. Once this psychological analysis of the human mind is recognized, even if only one person sees through it, this objective method of psychological analysis is obsolete.
The experiment lost its meaning, and with it, it was terminated.
And then there are no more jokes in the world, and humanity is gradually losing its sense of humor.
Master Mei, who is good at telling jokes, can't remember a single joke. None of them could remember what a joke was, and even if they saw the joke in the book, they couldn't laugh. Because humans have lost the ability to understand humor.
The story ends with an open-ended, pessimistic perspective, where humanity loses its sense of humor and the world becomes small and empty, like a guinea pig cage for experiments, losing the challenge of a labyrinth.
Although Asimov's "The Joke Teller" is not long, there are not many characters, and the plot is relatively simple, it advances layer by layer and deeply explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and human emotions.
The "universal void" in the novel represents mankind's desire for technological progress and exploration of the unknown. Through this machine, Asimov asks a thought-provoking question: if artificial intelligence can reveal the origin and nature of human emotions, what impact will such a discovery have on human society?
Asimov skillfully uses humor as a tool to explore human nature in his novels. The origin and mechanism of humor as a universal expression of human emotions have always been difficult problems in psychological and sociological research. By linking humor to extraterrestrial intelligent life, Asimov not only proposes an unexpected sci-fi setting, but also challenges the limitations of human self-perception.
Overall, "The Joke Teller" is a thoughtful and philosophical science fiction novel, which not only attracts readers with its novel ideas and humorous expressions, but also raises philosophical questions about artificial intelligence understanding the complex psychology and emotions of human beings, demonstrates Asimov's unique insights into the relationship between artificial intelligence and human emotions, and also guides readers to think about the complexity and uniqueness of human emotions through the element of humor.
This work is one of Asimov's many science fiction novels, and it deserves to be savored by readers.