like-that

An eight-panel SMBC comic. An older bald man with round glasses argues with his daughter, a young woman with curly orange hair who is accompanied by two pale humanoid robots. Panel 1, the father points and shouts, 'You are not going out like that young lady!' Panel 2, the daughter, standing between the two robots, says 'But dad!' then 'No!' Panel 3, the father, angry, rants: 'You kids these days keep bifurcating your consciousness into multiple agents that have separate experiences that are subsequently combined in the cloud!' Panel 4, he adds, 'In my day, we had a unified internal concept of identity! One person, one body!' The daughter protests, 'Dad! That phrase is offensive!' Panel 5, he retorts, 'What's offensive is your generation walkin' around all day violatin' the intuitive notion of selfhood!' Panel 6, deflating, he says quietly, 'I wonder what your poor dead mother would say.' Panel 7, the daughter pulls out a phone and says, 'One sec I'll pull up her digital clone.' Panel 8, the father reads the phone, the mother's clone says 'It's fine, Bob,' and the father snaps 'Dammit!' while the daughter laughs 'Ha!' offscreen. In the votey aftercomic, a close-up line drawing shows the orange-haired woman's face as the mother's voice says, 'God, I'm glad this is all a holodeck simulation.' The joke: a father rails against his kids splitting their minds into multiple cloud-merged agents, then loses an argument to his late wife's AI clone, who herself turns out to believe reality is just a simulation.