become-one
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with a futurist on stage declaring that people who worry the technological singularity will mean humans get "replaced by the machines" are wrong. Instead, he enthusiastically proclaims: "We will modify our bodies, change ourselves. We will become ONE with the machines!" The scene then cuts to "Later, in the future," where we see a human-machine hybrid sitting at a dinner table across from a robot. The robot is breaking up with the human, saying: "I'm sorry, Dave. I just... I feel like I can do better."
The joke subverts the optimistic transhumanist narrative about human-machine merging. The futurist imagines "becoming one with the machines" as a triumphant evolutionary leap, but the comic reveals that even after merging with technology, the fundamental human experience of romantic rejection persists. The machines don't want us as partners any more than they would have wanted to keep us around as separate beings.
The Humor
The humor comes from deflating grandiose futurist rhetoric with the most mundane possible outcome. The transhumanist vision of human-machine fusion is typically framed in epic terms -- transcending mortality, achieving superhuman intelligence, evolving beyond our biological limitations. Instead, SMBC reduces it to a bad date at a restaurant where your robot partner dumps you because they think they can "do better." The robot's name-drop of "Dave" is also a nod to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the AI famously refused to cooperate with the human astronaut Dave. The title text ("It's not you, it's your species") reframes the classic breakup cliche as an interspecies rejection.
References
The name "Dave" and the robot's calm, apologetic tone echo HAL 9000's interactions with astronaut Dave Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). The technological singularity is a concept popularized by mathematician Vernor Vinge and futurist Ray Kurzweil, referring to a hypothetical point where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.