2014-03-10
Explanation
The Joke
A woman asks a man "How are you?" and he replies "Great." She then asks "And how are you?" and he says "Just okay." She informs him that his lack of consistent self-assessment means he has failed the Turing Test (a test for determining whether an AI can pass as human). In the next scene, she asks a robot to compute a large multiplication, and when it hesitates, she tells it that its lack of mental power means it has failed the "Robot Test." In the final panels, two observers watch both the failed human and the failed robot on a monitor and say "Oh no. They failed the Cyborg Test."
The Humor
The comic plays on the concept of the Turing Test, which is designed to determine whether a machine can exhibit human-like intelligence. Here, the tester applies absurd and unfair criteria: a human "fails" at being human because of a minor inconsistency in small talk, and a robot "fails" at being a robot because it cannot instantly compute a large number. The final twist -- that both of them together have somehow failed a "Cyborg Test" -- escalates the absurdity to its logical extreme. The humor lies in the idea that if you set arbitrary and unreasonable standards for what counts as human, robot, or cyborg, nothing can pass any test. It satirizes the tendency to gatekeep identity categories based on cherry-picked criteria.
References
- The Turing Test was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a measure of machine intelligence. In its classic form, a human judge converses with both a human and a machine, and if the judge cannot reliably distinguish between them, the machine is said to have passed.