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Afternoon Links: Do Androids Dream of Hacky Rape Jokes?

Data, the first robot comic, isn’t out to take over the lucrative human comedy game (the 2 drink minimum messes with his circuitry). His programmer’s goal in creating him was to bring us one step closer to a future in which “we can have a companion robot that doesn’t piss us off all the time” like jerkfaced Siri. He’s equipped with sensors that allow him to read the audience’s response to his jokes (“Using your feedback, [my programmer] hopes that one day I will become an autonomous robotic performer. Like Kevin Costner”), but as a robot who “know[s] no emotion” he will, hopefully, be unable to join in the chilling, angry chorus that has followed Lindy West’s debate with comedian Jim Norton. He can just close his mechanical eyes and rest while the disembodied internet humanoids stand up for freedom of expression by tweeting their desire for “jim norton [to rape] the fat girl” and other sentiments that crash my hard drive.