Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3306 - 3310 (12th to 16th September 2016)
Tova:
If you think worldbuilding is more important than story, then maybe QC is not the comic for you.
But with regards to this particular story, of the existence of a battery technology in the QCverse which is not fully understood - for all the words written to attack this idea, I have to say that my impression was that this kind of thing surely does occur. Off the top of my head, I don't think that the mechanism of asprin was perfectly understood when it was first produced. Maybe someone knows better than me?
So, I decided to ask the All Knowing Oracle, and amusingly enough, found this recent article.
Researchers Might Have Accidentally Made Batteries Last 400 Times Longer
In particular:
--- Quote ---Instead of lithium, researchers at UC Irvine have used gold nanowires to store electricity, and have found that their system is able to far outlast traditional lithium battery construction. The Irvine team's system cycled through 200,000 recharges without significant corrosion or decline.
However, they don't exactly know why. The original idea of the experiment was to make a solid-state battery: one that uses an electrolyte gel, rather than liquid, to help hold charge. Liquid batteries, like the common lithium variety, are extremely combustible and sensitive to temperature. The Irvine team was experimenting by substituting a much thicker gel.
"We started to cycle the devices, and then realized that they weren't going to die," said Reginald Penner, a lead author of the paper. "We don't understand the mechanism of that yet."
--- End quote ---
To switch tracks, there is a particularly awesome film called Primer which is about a couple of inventors who accidentally invent time travel. They invent it and start to exploit it, but it certainly could not be said that they fully understood it before they built it. They didn't even know what they'd invented at first.
This is not some kind of artistic-license bullshit. History abounds with accidental inventions. Penicillin being the most famous example. Primer, for mine, is actually the most immersive and realistic-feeling depiction of time-travel invention that I've ever seen.
--- Quote from: oddtail on 12 Sep 2016, 02:10 ---... engineering usually *follows* theoretical science, not the other way around. Usually the process is well understood way before we can make it viable. The first atomic bomb operated on a fairly simple principle. Take two particles of a certain kind and smash them together. The problem was to get the particles to *do* that, and that cost a lot of time, money and thinking.
--- End quote ---
Usually, yes. In that example, sure.
But - critically - not always.
To cut a long story short (too late), Jeph's scenario is not nearly as outrageous as you are trying to make out.
oddtail:
--- Quote from: Akima on 12 Sep 2016, 15:26 ---
--- Quote from: oddtail on 12 Sep 2016, 03:48 ---I don't think it's prejudice, anymore, to be all "I'm surrounded by technology that I have no idea how it works and what it might do".
--- End quote ---
Since we are all surrounded by people of whom it is equally true that we don't know how they work, and what they might do, I think it would qualify as prejudice if we applied different standards to AI sentient beings.
The issue of battery-safety is a real one though, and has come up with proposed technologies (sodium sulphur batteries, for example) in our world. However, it's important not to apply different, neophobic standards to new technologies from those we apply to ones we live with every day. I'm pretty sure that if someone proposed today a transport technology involving motor-cars driving around under unreliable guidance, with a tankful of highly inflammable, and in some circumstances explosive, liquid fuel, we would declare it too unsafe to be allowed.
--- End quote ---
But the comic explicitly stated that it's not just potentially unsafe batteries. It's batteries that no-one actually has any idea how they operate. This has no parallel in the real world. It's not neophobic to be worried about untested technology of unproven safety. In a world with safety belts in cars, with emission limits on factories and with strict limits on how much radiation and in what way one may receive during a medical procedure, something no-one actually knows the mechanics of would never be something most people would be comfortable around, and rightly so. It's not about the risk, it's about the unknown.
Regarding the prejudice thing, if AI in QC-verse are discriminated against based on unfair assumptions as to what they might do, it's prejudice. If there's something inherently worrying about the way their power sources operate or might operate, and someone stays away from them based on that, I don't see how that is prejudice. The closest real-life parallel would be staying away from a person who behaves erratically, or from a person who seems to have some sort of visible "mysterious" sickness. Real-life people may do all sorts of things, but they do not tend to literally explode, which might happen to an AI (note: not necessarily literally explode, I mean it as a catch-all term for something happening that is unsafe and can't be easily predicted or prevented). But if a person, for any physical or behavioural reason, gave other people an idea that they are a complete wildcard and something might happen completely unexpectedly that involves them, avoiding that person would not be something I think of as prejudice.
And I completely disagree with the "we don't know how people work" argument. I may not know what a specific person may do, they may do all sorts of random stuff, but general patterns of human behaviour are pretty clear in most situations. Granted, AI in QC behave in a similarly predictable way, because they for the most part seem to behave like humans, but again - if they existed in real life, I'd be more worried about the physical threat their bodies may be posing, regardless of the AI's actual intent.
To put it another way, one may chuckle at the "untested particle accelerators strapped to our backs" line from the original Ghostbusters movie. But if in real life, a large number of people walked around with those strapped to them, staying clear from people equipped with a potentially dangerous "magical" technology would not be presumptuous, it would be reasonable. And if AIs are powered by something that works in an unexplained way, they are pretty much that.
Even ignoring the more sci-fi flavour of AI from QC... realistically, a wide adoption of an unverified and unsafe technology would be difficult to accept. To give one example, cars, including their engines, have to meet certain, fairly strict, safety standards. A technology that is neither regulated nor well researched could not possibly be certified to be safe. I don't think it would be either easy to implement, or to make people agree with, a car that does not meet the usual standards, or a car based on a possibly unreliable technology. I see AIs as similar, not because they are AI, but because they apparently need to be powered by something that is not reasonably guaranteed to be safe.
jheartney:
I'm reasonably sure that before gold nanowire batteries start appearing in consumer devices, there will be lots and lots of safety testing, not to mention vigorous investigation of what the mechanism of their longevity is. Too many class-liability lawyers waiting to pounce for it to be any other way.
jheartney:
--- Quote from: Tova on 12 Sep 2016, 16:13 ---If you think worldbuilding is more important than story, then maybe QC is not the comic for you.
--- End quote ---
Note the rest of my comment: "with the caveat that Jeph is obviously more interested in funny storylines than in world-building. If the storylines are funny enough, we don't care about how unlikely they are."
Is it cold in here?:
Over analyzing is a fun game.
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