2010-09-05
Explanation
This comic imagines a world where animal brains have been uploaded into computers. A frustrated man tells his wife, "Goddammit, honey. Philbert killed Photoshop and put its remains in the middle of the desktop." His wife cheerfully responds, "Aww, he's giving you a present!" The caption reads, "This was the major problem with animal-to-machine brain uploads."
The joke is a riff on the well-known behavior of house cats, who hunt small animals and proudly deposit the dead prey on their owner's doorstep or bed as a "gift." Here, a cat's brain has been uploaded into a computer, so "Philbert" the digital cat carries out the same instinct in software form: killing a program (Photoshop) and leaving its "remains" (the crashed application or its icon) on the computer desktop. The humor lies in the perfect analogy between a physical cat's behavior and its digital equivalent, and in the wife's reaction, which mirrors exactly how a cat owner might respond to finding a dead mouse on their pillow.