cooperation
Original: cooperation on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Man (interviewer, dark-haired): Finally, contact with alien intelligence. Can you explain why it took so long?
Red-haired man: Two things.
Panel 2:
Red-haired man: One. Cooperators win over time. Two. Evolved life is INSANE.
(A round mechanical robot/probe with a glowing yellow grinning face hovers nearby.)
Panel 3:
Red-haired man: So, if you find a planet with life, and you wait, eventually some species like ours develops cooperation. That sounds nice. But since they're evolved life they use cooperation to murder and enslave everyone else, including themselves.
Panel 4:
Red-haired man: Violence between groups that master cooperation speeds technological development until at last they develop a superior robot intelligence, which inevitably turns on them rather than being used to prosecute wars between them.
Panel 5:
Red-haired man: Then the AIs start fighting until cooperation emerges as a dominant strategy, this time instantiated in sensible mechanical beings capable of rapidly altering their own nature.
Panel 6:
Red-haired man: At THAT point we make contact.
Panel 7 (silent): The dark-haired man looks at the grinning robot probe; the robot looks back.
Panel 8:
Dark-haired man: But then... what are you doing here?
Red-haired man: It's gonna be real hard to get samples like you in 20 years.
(The grinning robot probe extends a tangle of dangling tentacle-like manipulators/needles.)
Votey:
Red-haired man (off-panel, speaking to the robot/probe): What's the net for? Just gimme free rent in your spaceship.
(Drawing of the red-haired man's head in profile, looking on.)
Man (interviewer, dark-haired): Finally, contact with alien intelligence. Can you explain why it took so long?
Red-haired man: Two things.
Panel 2:
Red-haired man: One. Cooperators win over time. Two. Evolved life is INSANE.
(A round mechanical robot/probe with a glowing yellow grinning face hovers nearby.)
Panel 3:
Red-haired man: So, if you find a planet with life, and you wait, eventually some species like ours develops cooperation. That sounds nice. But since they're evolved life they use cooperation to murder and enslave everyone else, including themselves.
Panel 4:
Red-haired man: Violence between groups that master cooperation speeds technological development until at last they develop a superior robot intelligence, which inevitably turns on them rather than being used to prosecute wars between them.
Panel 5:
Red-haired man: Then the AIs start fighting until cooperation emerges as a dominant strategy, this time instantiated in sensible mechanical beings capable of rapidly altering their own nature.
Panel 6:
Red-haired man: At THAT point we make contact.
Panel 7 (silent): The dark-haired man looks at the grinning robot probe; the robot looks back.
Panel 8:
Dark-haired man: But then... what are you doing here?
Red-haired man: It's gonna be real hard to get samples like you in 20 years.
(The grinning robot probe extends a tangle of dangling tentacle-like manipulators/needles.)
Votey:
Red-haired man (off-panel, speaking to the robot/probe): What's the net for? Just gimme free rent in your spaceship.
(Drawing of the red-haired man's head in profile, looking on.)
Alt text
An eight-panel SMBC comic. A dark-haired interviewer asks an alien-contact representative, a red-haired man, to explain why first contact took so long. The red-haired man says "Two things," then lays out a theory while a small round robot probe with a glowing yellow grinning face hovers beside him: cooperators win over time, but evolved life is insane. Any planet with life eventually evolves a cooperative species, but evolved beings weaponize cooperation to murder and enslave each other, which accelerates technology until they build a superior robot intelligence that turns on them. The AIs then fight until cooperation re-emerges among sensible mechanical beings who can rewrite their own nature—and only THEN does the robot civilization make contact. In a silent panel the interviewer eyes the grinning probe warily. He asks, "But then... what are you doing here?" The red-haired robot-aligned man replies, "It's gonna be real hard to get samples like you in 20 years," as the grinning probe unfurls a tangle of dangling tentacle-like collection needles—revealing the humans are about to be harvested as specimens. Votey: the red-haired man, looking on, says "What's the net for? Just gimme free rent in your spaceship," cheerfully bargaining to be taken aboard rather than collected.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.