Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke Two people discuss the Fermi Paradox -- the question of why, given the vastness of the universe, we haven't encountered other intelligent life. One suggests that among the trillions of pl

## The Joke A doctor tells a couple: "I'm afraid you were... an accident." This is a reversal of the classic scenario where parents tell a child they were an accident. Here, the parents are being tol

## The Joke A man announces he's happy because he's decided that all of his character flaws are actually "funny, quirky personality charms." He no longer has to live up to personal standards or pay a

## The Joke Two characters discuss the philosophical concept of qualia -- the subjective, conscious experiences that some philosophers argue machines can never have. One points out that when philosop

## The Joke The comic's header reads "Never take a mathematician to the zoo." A mathematician standing at the zoo looks at a gazelle and dismissively says: "Pfft. A gazelle is just a giraffe, plotted

## The Joke A manager acknowledges a well-known truth about modern office jobs: employees are present for eight hours a day but only do about two hours of actual work, spending the rest browsing the

## The Joke A blob of conscious matter (depicted as a sentient potato-like being) asks the classic joke setup: "Why did the blob of conscious matter cross the road?" The answer turns out to be that h

## The Joke A politician announces a filibuster on the Senate floor, declaring he will speak until he can no longer stand. But instead of passionately debating legislation about justice or policy, he

## The Joke At an airport security checkpoint, a TSA officer asks a woman with glasses: "Are you carrying any explosive chemicals?" She responds: "Probably not." The votey reads: "Fun Fact: No statis

## The Joke Two characters discuss the philosophical "heap problem" (the Sorites paradox): at what point does a collection of individual items become a "heap"? One grain of something is not a heap; a

## The Joke The comic is titled "What It''s Like" and shows people on what appears to be public transit. Someone asks "So what do you guys do?" A bearded man with glasses launches into a tirade, iden

## The Joke A woman is enthusiastically explaining to two friends that animal genitalia morphology is directly tied to social structure. She describes how gorillas, which have a harem-style social st

## The Joke A man says "I love you" to a woman. She replies that he has said that so many times the words have lost their meaning. He asks her to repeat that, and she says: "You have said that so man

## The Joke A man excitedly announces that he has set up a bioengineering lab in his basement. He boasts about his capabilities: he can use originally programmed enzymes to selectively insert code in

## The Joke A man wakes up screaming "AAAAA!" His partner asks "What?" He explains he had a dream where he had finals tomorrow but had not been in college for 20 years. She says: "Oh yay, I have thos

## The Joke The free market is presented as a powerful optimization algorithm that efficiently allocates resources — but one that optimizes for a metric (profit) that doesn't necessarily correspond t

## The Joke A woman presents a thought experiment about machine ethics to a robot. She describes a scenario: one robot is very low on energy and about to lose its memory, when another robot walks by

## The Joke A child asks: "Daddy, why do rich people have bigger graves?" The father explains that rich people are higher in minerals than the average person because they are big and charismatic, and

## The Joke The comic plays on the common internet trend where people share things that "will make you feel old" -- typically pop culture references or facts about how long ago something happened. In

## The Joke A woman points out that a man is always correcting her use of cliches in writing. He agrees: "Absolutely." She then retorts that this makes him an English professor droning on about stude

## The Joke The comic is titled "How to Get an Economist to Sleep with You." A woman approaches a man (the economist) and says, "Hi there. I'm not going to try to seduce you." When the economist asks

## The Joke The comic shows "Responses to a Goose That Lays Golden Eggs" from two perspectives. The **Dog** response is straightforward: "Kill it to see if there's more gold inside!" and "Take what e

## The Joke In the first panel, a man in formal attire approaches a woman with what sounds like a scandalous proposition: "Hello, miss. Might I interest you in some... premarital sex?" In the second

## The Joke A man is shown praying with his eyes closed and hands clasped. But instead of thanking God for the usual blessings, he says: "Thank you for a relatively long lifespan, for alcohol dehydro

## The Joke The comic discusses real psychological research showing that people can be made to believe almost anything about a policy simply by being told it was proposed by their preferred political

## The Joke A professor presents a scenario: "Imagine you're in an out-of-control trolley. You're headed towards three buildings, and you control which one you slam into. Two buildings contain five p

## The Joke A multi-panel comic about whether robots will ever understand the human mind. A man says robots will never understand the human mind. A woman corrects him: "That's not because the human m

## The Joke A woman excitedly tells a man: "Hahahaha! You know your theorem on homeomorphic function construction? I found a way to use it to cure cancer!" The man screams: "NOOOOOOOO!!" The caption

## The Joke A multi-panel comic about biological differences between men and women. A woman explains: "I think most of the inherent biological differences are small, and some disappear under differen

## The Joke A man asks God two questions. First: "Hey God, do you care whether there exist any odd numbers that are equal to the sum of their proper divisors?" God answers "No." Then: "And if you had

## The Joke A bald man with glasses explains Bayesian probability to an audience. He notes that according to Bayesianism, every thesis, no matter how ridiculous, has some probability of being true --

## The Joke A woman invites a man back to her place, telling him to make sure he brings a condom. In the next panels, they are shown in an intimate embrace, and she asks if he brought one. He holds u

## The Joke A woman tells a man: "It's not fair, Gil. You got all the good genes in the family." In the second panel, she qualifies this: "Oh, that isn't true. You made a lot of people happy working

## The Joke The comic presents a parallel between robots and humans, each questioning whether the other truly has feelings. A robot asks: "Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just p

## The Joke A man stands at a podium telling a story: "A family come back from a trip to the countryside to find a giant bug inside their home. They kick out some boarders to make space for the bug.

## The Joke The comic presents a flowchart starting with "Strong AI Invented." The first decision is "Teach it ethics?" If yes, the AI "sees humans violating ethics constantly," which leads to "All h

## The Joke Scientists present a breakthrough: they have created nanoscale matter capable of movement, connections to other nanoscale objects, and signaling. With just one handful of "nano clay," you

## The Joke A woman presents an invention: an "entirely new way to tell bots from humans." The method works by sending a page from a tax return from three years ago. A robot will literally never atte

## The Joke A man describes sports fandom in clinical, technical terms: fans' clothing and home decorations are part of an "internet of things"; they communicate through databases that produce March

## The Joke A person at what appears to be a party or social gathering proposes a seemingly scientific idea: selectively binding ferromagnetic particles to certain people, then using a powerful magne

## The Joke A couple is in bed together, and one partner doesn't understand "dirty talk." The other explains that it's a sex thing where you talk in a low voice and say what you like, and the other p

## The Joke A father tells his son that he never got along with the son's grandfather, who always knew the son had a sister, but she got "lost." The son asks what "lost" means, and the father explain

## The Joke A man uses a pickup line on a woman: "Hey baby, wanna hop on my hedonic treadmill and ride until you're no longer deriving any pleasure?" The woman responds with interest ("Ooooh"). The c

## The Joke The comic presents "High Tech Prank #7,819: A Wrinkle in Time" as a step-by-step guide. Step 1: Create an app that makes people's faces look much older. Step 2: Wait for someone to use a

## The Joke The comic begins with two observations: more and more jobs are being automated, and most wealth is held by just a few people. Meanwhile, science has shown that crowds have better analytic

## The Joke A doctor tells a man that "the paternity test is complete" and that "I'm afraid you're not a father." The man is shocked ("What?!") and protests that they didn't draw blood or anything. T

## The Joke The comic presents a simplified view of human history as a repeating cycle: someone proposes a reasonable system, other people find ways to exploit it, attempts to fix the exploitation cr

## The Joke The comic is a Batman parody. In the opening panels, a character (resembling Batman) says "You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it." But instead of this being a threat

## The Joke Two people are complaining about different generations. One says "I can't believe this generation -- my generation slaves away while they do everything!" The other counters: "My generatio

## The Joke A parent brings their hyperactive son to a doctor, saying "Doc, my son has ADHD. Can you prescribe some medication?" The doctor agrees it seems warranted. In the next panel, labeled "Late