Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is another entry in SMBC's recurring "ethics" series, which typically features philosophical thought experiments taken to absurd extremes.

The comic presents a dialogue about the ethics of creating conscious artificial intelligence that could cause killing. One character poses this as wrong, and the other agrees -- "Wrong!" The questioner then asks: "Let me ask you this: is it OK to go back in time and kill Hitler?" The respondent enthusiastically agrees: "Sure!"

The first character then proposes: "What if I create a device that travels to the past and kills Hitler, but the device is conscious? Will it kill?" This creates a logical trap combining the two previous premises -- it's wrong to create conscious AI that kills, but it's okay to kill Hitler. The respondent starts to falter.

The comic then explores the philosophical objection: "That's not right. You can't just SAY a rock will kill. They have to have taken some action or demonstrated potential to take action." The counterpart responds: "That's easy to solve. All I have to do is show you how many of kill-bots, and I'm sure a few will fit in the class."

The final panels deliver the punchline: "We are going to deserve the robot revolution, aren't we?" followed by "The de facto theodicy undergrad curriculum makes the ethicist I am."

The humor satirizes how undergraduate ethics courses often devolve into increasingly convoluted thought experiments that combine multiple ethical dilemmas (the ethics of AI consciousness, time travel paradoxes, the "would you kill Hitler" hypothetical) into absurd compound scenarios. The comic mocks how philosophy students and professors can tie themselves in logical knots by chaining together individually reasonable ethical positions that become nonsensical when combined. The "robot revolution" line suggests that if this is how humans reason about AI ethics, perhaps the robots would be justified in revolting.