2013-01-02
Original: 2013-01-02 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Old bald man with glasses and a white beard, wearing a purple shirt, gestures toward a small line graph: "In developed countries, population grows logistically. It rises, slows, then levels."
Panel 2:
Old man (continuing): "This process of leveling out instead of rising exponentially has been historically coincident with the exponential rise in computing power."
Panel 3:
Old man, looking intense: "Isn't that a bit... SUSPICIOUS?"
Panel 4:
The old man gestures to a woman with dark hair in a green top, while another person's profile appears at the right edge: "Computers haven't gotten faster, friends. There are secret people running them. 100 billion people."
Panel 5:
Old man (continuing, pointing): "Whenever you run a computer program, billions of missing humans make the calculations and then give them to your computer, which is in fact no faster than a UNIVAC."
Panel 6:
Old man, arms spread wide: "The chips in your computer are just radios to send the data. Computation isn't following Moore's Law. It's following population growth!"
Panel 7:
Close-up of the old man's intense, grinning face beside the startled profile of another person.
Panel 8:
The woman in green and a person in an orange/brown vest with glasses look on. The vest-wearing person asks: "Do you actually believe any of that?"
The old man replies: "I believe everything that sounds cool enough."
Votey:
A woman with dark hair (the one in the green top) appears with a speech bubble: "So every time I load porno-"
The old man interrupts/answers: "950,000 disgusted slaves and 50,000 bored German slaves."
Old bald man with glasses and a white beard, wearing a purple shirt, gestures toward a small line graph: "In developed countries, population grows logistically. It rises, slows, then levels."
Panel 2:
Old man (continuing): "This process of leveling out instead of rising exponentially has been historically coincident with the exponential rise in computing power."
Panel 3:
Old man, looking intense: "Isn't that a bit... SUSPICIOUS?"
Panel 4:
The old man gestures to a woman with dark hair in a green top, while another person's profile appears at the right edge: "Computers haven't gotten faster, friends. There are secret people running them. 100 billion people."
Panel 5:
Old man (continuing, pointing): "Whenever you run a computer program, billions of missing humans make the calculations and then give them to your computer, which is in fact no faster than a UNIVAC."
Panel 6:
Old man, arms spread wide: "The chips in your computer are just radios to send the data. Computation isn't following Moore's Law. It's following population growth!"
Panel 7:
Close-up of the old man's intense, grinning face beside the startled profile of another person.
Panel 8:
The woman in green and a person in an orange/brown vest with glasses look on. The vest-wearing person asks: "Do you actually believe any of that?"
The old man replies: "I believe everything that sounds cool enough."
Votey:
A woman with dark hair (the one in the green top) appears with a speech bubble: "So every time I load porno-"
The old man interrupts/answers: "950,000 disgusted slaves and 50,000 bored German slaves."
Alt text
An eight-panel SMBC comic. An old bald man with glasses, a white beard, and a purple shirt enthusiastically explains a conspiracy theory. He points to a logistic-curve graph and says population in developed countries 'rises, slows, then levels,' which he claims is suspiciously coincident with the exponential rise in computing power. He declares computers haven't actually gotten faster; instead 'secret people' run them, '100 billion people.' He insists that whenever you run a program, billions of missing humans do the calculations and feed them to your computer, which is no faster than a UNIVAC, and that the chips are just radios to send data, so computation follows population growth rather than Moore's Law. He gets increasingly animated, arms spread, grinning intensely beside a startled listener. A woman in a green top and a person in a brown vest watch skeptically. The vested person asks, 'Do you actually believe any of that?' The man calmly replies, 'I believe everything that sounds cool enough.' Votey aftercomic: the dark-haired woman begins to ask 'So every time I load porno-' and the man cheerfully answers, '950,000 disgusted slaves and 50,000 bored German slaves.'
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.