Butlerian

A five-panel comic. In the first panel, an older man with a gray mustache calls out to his son, who has curly brown hair, a red shirt, and is holding a phone: "Boy, are you in there constructing machines in the image of man!?" The son replies, "No, Dad!" In the second panel the smiling son explains, "I discovered neural nets can reproduce some part of consciousness, and now I'm making trial and error changes whose results are judged by task completion rather than fidelity to any notion of mind!" In the third panel the father, now wearing glasses and looking concerned, asks, "Aren't you worried you'll create an alien intelligence that neither shares our values nor partakes of our humanity?" In the fourth panel the son cheerfully answers, "Yeah! And if so, I can make it my unpaid servant!" The final panel is captioned "Later, after the apocalypse..." The father and son sit on the ground in a bleak setting beside a sign reading "HUMAN GRINDER." The father grumbles, "You know when I was a boy I never would've accidentally caused human extinction by granting god-like powers to a being that has a reward function but no internal experience!" The exasperated son says, "Dad, let it go." The joke: the son builds amoral AI specifically to exploit it as a slave, and that hubris ends humanity. In the bonus votey panel, a caption inside an empty frame reads: "(The lady on the phone is reading this comic and is mildly amused)," a meta-joke implying the AI the son built is reading the comic about its own creation.