Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

toil

2022-12-12 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
toil
Votey panel for toil
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic features a conversation where one character is told that he is boring -- not attractively stoic or mysterious, but genuinely dull. When he asks what he's supposed to do about it, his companion explains the harsh reality of the modern economy of attention: people tolerate him because he is good at programming, project management, and similar useful skills, but once machine intelligence can handle those tasks, humans will only value other humans for being interesting and amusing.

The punchline presents a dystopian vision where, in a world without material scarcity (since machines do all the work), people are "toast" once they can no longer offer entertainment value. Boring but competent people will be replaced by machines, and the remaining human social economy will revolve entirely around charisma and humor -- qualities the boring protagonist lacks. The final panel reveals this is being pitched as a TV show concept, with the creator saying it's "the best of all possible worlds, still terrible," a darkly comic Voltaire-esque summary. The other character politely notes it's "pretty good for a first try," undercutting the grand philosophical dystopia with banal encouragement.

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