Teaching AI how to be sarcastic is totally the easiest thing ever

Pop culture has primed us to think that our robot friends of the future will be quick-witted quipsters. Television and films have their fair share of sardonic androids, from the foul-mouthed alcoholic Bender in Futurama to the acerbic J.A.R.V.I.S. from Ironman. But the reality of such amusing sidekicks remains far off. Cognitively speaking, sarcasm is one of the most complex forms of human expression--and it's therefore one of the hardest to teach AI systems. While voice recognition, machine translation, and other such tools are constantly improving, AI still lacks the ability to detect this uniquely human linguistic trait in either verbal or written conversation.