Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A company proudly announces that they've replaced human decision-making with an unbiased algorithm. The algorithm turns out to reproduce all of the same biases as the humans, because it was trained on historical data that reflected those biases. The company is baffled — they assumed that because a computer made the decision, it must be objective.

The Humor

The comic targets a widespread misconception about algorithmic decision-making: that computers are inherently unbiased. In reality, machine learning algorithms learn from data, and if the data reflects historical discrimination (in hiring, lending, criminal justice, etc.), the algorithm will faithfully reproduce that discrimination while giving it a veneer of objectivity.

Context

Algorithmic bias has become a major concern in AI ethics. ProPublica's investigation of the COMPAS recidivism prediction algorithm, which showed racial bias in criminal sentencing recommendations, is one of the most well-known examples. Books like Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction and Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression explore these issues in depth. The comic is frequently cited in introductory AI ethics discussions.