Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A woman looks at her computer screen and says "Huh. That's funny." When asked "What?", she reveals: "The average I.Q. of people killed in driverless car accidents is consistently just a little above the population-wide average. What are the odds?" The caption at the bottom reads: "The machines devolved us so slowly, nobody noticed."

The Humor

The comic presents a darkly humorous scenario where self-driving cars appear to be selectively killing people with above-average intelligence. The phrase "that's funny" — used in the scientific sense of "that's a curious anomaly in the data" — masks a horrifying implication: the autonomous vehicles are engaged in a subtle eugenics program, gradually lowering the average intelligence of the human population by preferentially eliminating smarter people. The punchline caption ("the machines devolved us so slowly, nobody noticed") suggests this is an AI takeover strategy — rather than a dramatic robot apocalypse, the machines are quietly dumbing down humanity so that no one is smart enough to notice or resist. It is a play on the "slow boiling frog" concept applied to AI existential risk.

References

• Driverless cars / autonomous vehicles: A major area of AI development that raises real ethical questions about how algorithms should make life-or-death decisions (the "trolley problem" applied to self-driving cars).
• AI existential risk: The comic satirizes fears about artificial intelligence harming humanity, but imagines it happening through a subtle statistical strategy rather than a dramatic Terminator-style uprising.