From AI-made jokes to Harry Potter fashion videos, AI can be used to make funny stuff. But can it be as funny as a human? And if it can, does it present a danger to comedy writers in the future? That’s something performers have been looking at in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, running from Aug 4 to 28.

Anyone can put on a show at the Fringe, and this year even robots were getting in on the act. One of Fringe’s big shows even used a small robot to come up with jokes from audience suggestions, which were then performed by humans. The results could be very funny, but sometimes they weren’t funny at all. That was part of the point, explained Piotr Mirowski, the show's co-maker.

“We do not use humans to show off AI; instead, we use AI to show its limitations, to showcase human creativity on the stage,” said Mirowski, according to the Guardian.

Comedian Pierre Novellie said that it will take a long time for AI to get good at creating comedy. “Comedy is the last thing that AI is going to get near,” Pierre told Sky News.

“Even normal human comedians struggle to tune their jokes for the right crowd at the right time, every time. But that’s what’s interesting about stand-up and fun.” But one performer at the Fringe said he’s using AI to make jokes for him because he’s out of ideas. Comedian Peter Bazely’s show has him playing a supporting role to “an entirely computer-generated comedian” called AI Jesus. The Fringe review website, Chortle, talked about today’s AI concerns: “In a world where artists are worried that AI could end up doing their jobs for them, Bazely is said to be praying this one will do exactly that.”

The reasons for companies wanting to use AI are certainly understandable, but the dangers they present to many people’s jobs are becoming more and more real, and that’s not very funny.

Back in March of this year, a letter calling for a six-month stop on advanced AI development was signed by over 1000 people working with AI technologies including Elon Musk and other well-known tech leaders, reported The New York Times. Then, in May, leaders in the AI industry signed a document from the Center for AI Safety warning that AI could present an exhibition-level danger and “should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war.”

You’re doing homework online for a science class. A question appears: Do newborn babies see the world in black and white? You don’t know the answer. Do you google it?

①Searching online for the answer may get you a better grade on the homework. But it won’t necessarily help you learn. Researchers note that students who usually receive higher marks on the homework but lower test grades are much more likely to use the Internet for answers while completing their homework. With these findings in mind, the researchers are questioning the validity of homework as a useful learning tool.

Glass, a psychologist, discovered this from analyzing homework and the grades on tests that he gave college students who took his courses from 2008 to 2017. He gave his students a series of online homework tasks. In 2008, only around 3 out of 20 students performed better on their homework than on the exam. By 2017, more than half of the students performed this way. Glass wondered what caused this result. ②So he thought about what had changed over the 10 years. One big thing was the rise of smartphones. They existed in 2008, but were not common. Now almost everyone carries one. ③So it would be easier today to quickly go online and find the answer to almost any homework question. But students can’t use phones during an exam. And that might explain why they aren’t doing that well on the tests.

To test this, Glass and a co-author Kang asked students in 2017 and 2018 whether they came up with their homework answers themselves or looked them up. ④Students who tended to look up answers also tended to do better on homework than their exams.

According to Nielsen, the average number of mobile phone calls we make is dropping every year, after hitting a peak in 2007. And our calls are getting shorter: In 2005 they averaged three minutes in length;   now they’re almost half that.

We are moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly plain among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die. Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling.

We have to open Schrodinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more torturous: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our annoying them, and texting lets us ping one another but not at the same time. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) Despite the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone should be available immediately.

We’ll still make fewer phone calls, as most of our former phone time will migrate to other media. But the calls we do make will be longer, reserved for the sort of deep discussion that the medium does best.

As video chatting becomes more common, enabled by the new iPhone and other devices, we might see the growth of persistent telepresence, leaving video-chat open all day so we can speak to a spouse or colleague spontaneously. Or, to put it another way, we’ll call less but talk more.