Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Two people in bed discuss the concept of an "ethical singularity" — a play on the technological singularity. They observe that each generation is horrified by the previous generation's ethics but also considers the next generation's ethics "a bit much." The pace is accelerating: ethical generational shifts that once took 5,000 years now take about 20. They project that by 2050, people will view yesterday's norms as barbaric and tomorrow's as radical, and by 2100, humanity will be in a state of "continuous judgment and enlightenment" where every sentence becomes socially repulsive before it is finished.

The proposed solution — tying ethics to computationally difficult problems (like prime factoring) — is dismissed by the other character, who says "I don't think ethics should be tied to CPU performance," prompting the response "How backwards."

The Humor

The humor works on multiple levels:

• Concept comedy: The "ethical singularity" is a clever analogy that takes the real phenomenon of accelerating moral progress and extrapolates it to an absurd conclusion where moral standards change faster than people can speak.
• Observational humor: The comic captures the genuine experience of watching moral norms shift rapidly — what was acceptable 20 years ago is now considered offensive, and today's progressive positions may be seen as insufficient tomorrow.
• The proposed fix: Deliberately slowing ethical progress by tying it to unsolvable math problems is both absurd and darkly logical, satirizing the desire to slow down social change.
• The final exchange: Calling someone "backwards" for not wanting to tie ethics to CPU performance is a meta-joke about how quickly the label of moral backwardness gets applied.

References

• Technological Singularity: The concept, popularized by Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, posits that technological growth will become uncontrollable and irreversible past a certain point. The comic applies this framework to moral evolution.
• Prime factoring: The reference to finding prime factors of large numbers relates to computational complexity theory and cryptography, where such problems are famously difficult to solve.