Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A fairy appears and offers to grant one wish. The person, having read enough stories about wish-granting going wrong, tries to carefully word their wish to avoid loopholes. They specify exactly what they want, in precise legal language, with numerous caveats and exceptions. The fairy grants the wish exactly as stated — and it still goes wrong because of a loophole the person didn't anticipate.

The Humor

The comic plays on the wish-fulfillment trope (genies, monkeys' paws, etc.) where cleverly worded wishes always backfire. The joke is that no amount of careful specification can make a wish loophole-proof — it's like writing a contract with an adversarial supernatural lawyer. This is essentially the halting problem applied to natural language: you can't prove your wish covers all cases.

Context

This connects to problems in contract law, software specification, and AI alignment — all domains where precisely specifying what you want turns out to be much harder than it seems. The AI alignment community frequently uses genie/wish analogies to explain why building a "friendly" superintelligence is so difficult: you have to specify human values precisely enough that no interpretation is catastrophic.