Electric Dreams

Great news this week that Red Dwarf is to return with the majority of the cast intact, including Kryten, the robot who broke his programming. This was cause for celebration in the Chatterbox household, as our dvds are very well worn, and some new material will be seized upon with much delight. Once we had shared our worries that they will get rid of the wonderful grunginess of the original series we moved onto one of our favourite topics of the moment, which is whether a robot will ever be able to tell a joke that it has created all by itself.

In science fiction, robots are constantly breaking out of their programming to develop independent thought and sometimes a sense of humour, but even in fiction there are very few examples of robots designed with the consciousness and creativity to make a real joke. I certainly can’t think of any evidence of this in the real world, even with the fancy chess-playing computers. Somehow I have difficulty with the idea that Deep Blue, or even one of his cleverer descendents could get the giggles. Maybe that’s my lack of imagination though….

The jury is still out in our house, mainly because we run out of processing power before reaching a conclusion.

While you are thinking about it here’s a bit from an early series of Red Dwarf.