Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Titled "Why We Don't Want Intelligent Machines," this comic reimagines the familiar Windows "program not responding" dialog box in a world where computers have feelings. In the first panel, the dialog shows three buttons: "Close Program," "Continue Waiting," and a new third option -- "Apologize." When the user clicks "Apologize," the program responds by saying it will open up if they can talk about "the state of our relationship." The program then becomes "not responding" again, and the user gives up and clicks another button.

The joke satirizes the idea of artificial intelligence by imagining that a truly intelligent computer would also inherit all the emotional neediness and interpersonal baggage of a real person. Instead of making technology better, genuine machine intelligence would make it dramatically worse -- your frozen program would guilt-trip you instead of just crashing. It's a humorous argument that we might actually prefer our machines to be dumb and obedient rather than sentient and emotionally demanding.