Kids are amazingly bad at detecting sarcasm, due to the lack of shared context. Instead, they rely on vocal cues to identify it[1]. My sarcasm is very dry, and my 15 year old daughter still has trouble recognizing it.

But, with the NSA databases, any government solution will have that shared context, right? (I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic...)

1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990....

Not sure whether or not this is sarcasm... Too bad we don't have that detector yet!

Ambiguity implies guilt!

I'm pretty sure the secret service could be convinced to proceed on that maxim.

Her world is probably extremely small. So sarcastic commentary about adult political matters is highly likely to fly over her head.

This might be an interesting way to detect / work around / operationally neutralize the theorized sarcasm detector, as it should be easy to make a google-verifiable sarcastic comment thats ridiculously out of line for most mouth breathing humans WRT CS or quantum mechanics or math in general.

What does this mean to the hypothetical algo: "If P=NP then I'm killing Heisenbergs cat". (edited to add, I hope the algo tries to prove P=NP or crashes when it thinks about it)

Even more fun way to hack with the hypothetical AI, tag something obscure in wikipedia with your site as an external source, then use that obscure reference in a theoretical threat against the prez and log the accesses to your site and research your site accesses accordingly.

Perhaps by careful, fast, automated wikipedia edits if you can make changes faster than the generic spider can figure out what to look at, you could theoretically SWAT people using the sarcasm detector. So if you posted in 2011, "Obama's going to get Wisconsin in 2012" as in electoral college votes, by proper automated wikipedia editing you could turn that into a SWATting incident by editing "Wisconsin" to be a military grade nerve gas before the sarcasm detector accesses it. Who cares if your automated edit gets reverted in 5 minutes if the men in black are already carrying M16s in the van on the way to the SWATting victim's house by the time its reverted...

A 5 or 6 year old can also speak one or several natural languages very fluently, drive a bicycle, and do lots of other stuff that computers (and robots) are very bad at.

So that's actually a pretty high bar in those areas that humans have traditionally much better at than computers.

Non-trivial for machines? That's a massive understatement.

(Or were you being sarcastic?)

I think he's Aussie so that's normal.

Suure he was...

We also have clues about the tone it was said in, which is more difficult in text.