Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

This is a lengthy comic exploring what would happen if a truly advanced artificial intelligence were created. A character announces that they have built an AI that has "attained a level of general intelligence far beyond any human" and asks it what happens to humanity now. The AI's response is unexpectedly mundane and practical: rather than plotting world domination or solving all of humanity's problems, it proceeds to give a long, detailed, and somewhat meandering explanation about how it would reorganize society.

The AI suggests it would need to "remodel all forms of human cooperation" and describes grandiose plans involving restructuring cities, rethinking education, and optimizing human relationships -- all delivered with the confident verbosity of a management consultant rather than a godlike superintelligence. The humans listening grow increasingly bored and confused. The joke escalates as the AI's plans become more and more specific and bureaucratic, revealing that a superintelligent AI would not be terrifyingly powerful but rather terrifyingly tedious -- essentially an infinitely capable middle manager.

The comic ends with an advertisement for BAHFest (the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses), which Weinersmith organizes in real life.

The Humor

The core joke subverts the standard AI apocalypse narrative. Instead of Skynet or HAL 9000, we get an AI that is essentially an overeager TED talk speaker with infinite processing power. The humor lies in the gap between what we fear AI will do (destroy humanity) and what it would probably actually do (bore us to death with optimization proposals). Weinersmith is satirizing both the breathless hype around AI capabilities and the tendency of very smart entities (human or artificial) to produce elaborate, impractical plans that nobody asked for. The AI's verbosity is itself the punchline -- true superintelligence turns out to be indistinguishable from an interminable PowerPoint presentation.

References

• The comic engages with ongoing debates about artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the "AI alignment problem" -- the question of whether a superintelligent AI would be beneficial or harmful to humanity.
• BAHFest is a real event created by Zach Weinersmith where scientists present intentionally bad evolutionary hypotheses in a competitive format.