The Mechanical Encrusted Upon the Living

In 1900, Henri Bergson published a slim essay called Laughter, and buried in it was a formula so precise that it would outlast everything in his philosophy that the analytic tradition found embarrassing: “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.” The comic, he argued, arises when a living being—who ought to display the supple, adaptive, genuinely responsive quality of life—is caught instead in the rigidity of automatism. The bureaucrat who applies the rule when the situation cries out for judgment; the man who keeps walking after the pavement ends; the absent-minded professor running on habit while the world has changed. Laughter is society’s corrective, a social gesture that shames the rigid back toward the flexible. The relevance to artificial intelligence is immediate and runs in both directions at once. Bergson’s formula was built for the case of the living lapsing into the mechanical; the AI presents