The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has by far the greatest mission statement of any government organization: developing gonzo technologies to prevent and create strategic surprise.

And this month, DARPA has created a strategic surprise to beat the band: the SocialSim sarcasm detector. It’s an artificial intelligence program developed at the University of Central Florida that can understand mockery on Twitter and Facebook and, you just know it, probably TikTok too.

Oh great, you say. Just what we need.

Only now, DARPA will know, deep in its twisted little AI bones, that you mean the diametric opposite: We don’t need this sarcasm-detector at all.

But maybe we do. Long have users of Twitter complained that there’s no font for sarcasm, which can lead to misunderstandings, sometimes trivial, sometimes grievous.

DARPA’s new AI is founded in something called sentiment analysis, which automates the detection of emotion, intention and torque in online language.

But how? It’s an algorithm. It doesn’t detect sarcasm because it consults sarcasm’s first principles — those I’d like to see — but because it has churned through sarcasm specimens for years, it can now distinguish eye-rolling inverted insults from sincerity.

On a stupid level, the SocialSim sarcasm detector can be used by companies trying to separate the wheat from the chaff of salty customer feedback. On a possibly more useful level, it can be used to interpret exchanges between bad actors planning nefarious acts.

“Sarcasm has been a major hurdle to increasing the accuracy of sentiment analysis, especially on social media, since sarcasm relies heavily on vocal tones, facial expressions, and gestures that cannot be represented in text,” said Brian Kettler, a program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, in a press release.

But we humans like it that way. To use sarcasm is to evade censors by slanting and barbing your words so that only your cohort fully understands it. The brain that grasps sarcasm — or its more sophisticated cousin, irony — is an organ of pleasure.

Molly Jong-Fast of the Daily Beast is an ace sarcastic tweeter. On Thursday, in response to a poll showing that 23% of Republicans believe that the government, media and finance are under the control of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, Jong-Fast tweeted, “Oh, that’s totally normal and good and not going to end in tears or anything.”

But it can get complicated.

Once I tweeted something that another tweeter thought was dumb (shocker). He retweeted me with the caption, “This person is a journalist.”

Can DARPA’s simulator decipher that “This person is a journalist” wasn’t meant as a statement of fact or high praise, but rather a slight, implying, “and should not be”?

Imagine how many janky cancellations and workplace heartbreaks DARPA could save us.