rise-of-the-machines

A two-character comic. A bald man and a woman wearing glasses, who is cradling a defeated robot, stand together. The man says it was surprisingly easy now that the robotic uprising used spears and rocks instead of missiles and lasers. The woman explains that if you look to historical data, the vast majority of battle-winners used pre-modern weaponry. A caption reads: "Thanks to machine-learning algorithms, the robot apocalypse was short-lived." The joke: an AI trained on historical battle data naively concluded that pre-modern weapons win, because winners historically used them, and so armed itself uselessly. Votey: a simple round-headed robot with antennae muses, "So many generals conduct land-wars in Asia. Must be a good move" — the same correlation-equals-causation reasoning error that doomed the robots.