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MACHINE AGE CARTOON

THE TABLET LOST. HE STAYED.

By Zimbo · October 30, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Jerry Kaplan strip in six panels: 1981 Teknowledge expert systems; 1987 GO PenPoint tablet; the tablet lost, in a museum case; 1994 Onsale auction; 2015 and 2024 books at Stanford; finale Kaplan and Issue the cat in a PenPoint tablet vehicle at a lookout over people working alongside machines.
Jerry Kaplan sold expert systems in 1981, bet on the pen tablet in 1987, built the first internet auction in 1994, wrote the AI-jobs book before the chatbot boom — and still says the doom story is science fiction. In six panels.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

Jerry Kaplan co-founded Teknowledge in 1981, one of the first commercial artificial-intelligence companies, selling expert systems while AI was still largely a laboratory curiosity. In 1987, as founding chief executive of GO Corporation, he bet the company on the pen tablet, building the PenPoint system years before tablets became everyday objects.

The tablet lost its moment, and the strip's third panel gives it the museum treatment it earned: a GO tablet in a display case, captioned as a bold idea ahead of its time, while Kaplan walks on to the next idea. In 1994 he co-founded Onsale, described by Stanford as the world's first internet auction website, which went public in 1997.

Kaplan wrote 'Humans Need Not Apply' in 2015, taking on wealth, work and automation years before the chatbot boom made AI jobs a mass-market argument, and published 'Generative Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know' in 2024 while teaching the social and economic impact of AI at Stanford. In a 2026 conversation with Yascha Mounk, he argued the AI extinction story is overstated science fiction, and that attention belongs on concrete, present-day risks.

The joke in Zimbo's strip is the long view: the man who arrived too early with the tablet ends the strip at a mountain lookout, riding in a PenPoint tablet on wheels with Issue the cat beside him, gazing at a valley where people work alongside machines in workshops, classrooms and auction stalls. The kicker lands his argument in one line: he called doom science fiction, and the future kept working.

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Satirical cartoon: a fossilized chunky 1990s GO tablet sits in a museum display case while its elderly inventor proudly lectures five note-taking humanoid robots, as a tabby cat lounges unimpressed on the case.THE TABLET LOSTSatirical cartoon: a caricatured Jensen Huang in his black leather jacket proudly presents a robot whose body is a toaster labeled 'CHATGPT MOMENT', plugged into a GPU meter and wearing a price tag reading '$2,000 / GPU / YEAR'.ZIMBO ROASTS: JENSEN HUANGSatirical cartoon: a smiling developer watches a cheerful robot type code on a laptop while a shadowy burglar in a hat crawls in through a tiny wooden back door built into the back of the laptop.THE UPDATE THAT LET STRANGERS INZimbo cartoon: Merv, a small anxious pale-metal robot with huge worried eyes, stands on a wooden stool dusting a tall shelf of hourglasses, every one with all its sand in the bottom bulb, while Issue, a brown mackerel tabby, sleeps curled on top of the shelf beside the last hourglass.THE HOURGLASS COLLECTION

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