Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3586-3590 (9th to 13th October 2017)

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anahata:
It shouldn't be hard to do,  as our sense of taste is mostly done by smell anyway.

BenRG:
Aww! Like neurocase says, you can just see in panel 6 that Faye responds with a blush! The real question now is whether Faye is ready (or willing) in herself to realise the implications of what Bubbles has been saying and doing for months now towards her. As her friend, Faye owes it to Bubbles to respond honestly and empathetically to her feelings; if she doesn't reciprocate, Bubbles deserves be be let down gently and early rather than strung along.

So, how will Faye react to this? I'm betting a slow-burn realisation that falls into place during the day. After that, we'll have a week's strip of a semi-panic-stricken Faye asking Marten, Dora and possibly Claire about what to do. Marten would probably be the most help as Dora would be mostly "Yeah, hit that right now, girl!" and Claire would be all "Squee! So cute!"

I'm honestly expecting Faye and Bubbles to go on a strange, awkward date together to see if their relationship can actually work as anything other than a close friendship and how that works out will be our final indication on where Jeph is taking this pairing: Close friends, a sisterly bond like that between Faye and Dora or romantic.


--- Quote from: SotFX on 09 Oct 2017, 23:33 ---You know, with the entire thing about not being able to eat things, I wonder if Hanners is going to pass that on to her father to develop a patch that allows the AI bodies to taste, or some equipment to allow it...
--- End quote ---

I've long thought that it would be a relatively trivial and obvious modification for military-grade chassis for them to be able to eat biological hydrocarbons and use the resulting processed chemicals as fuel for some kind of auxiliary power cell. There are some engineering issues like how to deal with the processes' gaseous and solid waste products (although we humans have largely resolved that problem for ourselves, it's just a matter of learning to deal with synthetics with the same hygiene needs as us).

However, on the issue of a sense of taste, it would inevitably be another experience that synthetics have that would be different to ours, much like their chemical analysis 'sense of smell'.

MrNumbers:
I retract. Faye is blushing. Flirting has commenced.

Alright. I'm seeing how this week plays out but then I'm breaking out my typewriter.

oddtail:
OK, so first of all: the comic is adorable. Certainly my top five ever in that respect. I kinda needed that with the week I'm having. I love Bubbles' expression when she says the "you're beautiful" line. I'm a bit sad for her (at least for now), because I think Faye does not register an AI in a robotic body as a possible romantic partner, and she's being somewhat oblivious. But I expected once she has a "oooooooooh!" moment, Faye might react positively, so I await that possibly happening. If that happens, I will squee at frequencies only dogs can hear.

Secondly: I know this is a universe with super-advanced technology, but I wonder how the chemical sensors that serve as "smell" work for AI. The human olfactory sense is very complex and (despite the popular wisdom claiming otherwise, mostly because we tend to compare humans to animals whose sense of smell is EVEN better than ours) incredibly sensitive and fine-tuned to many different substances. My mother is a chemist by education and she tested food for a living, for some time. Her claim is that a human smell or taste (if it isn't dulled by regular smoking and the like) can actually detect much smaller traces of certain substances, if you're trained for that, than many simple chemical tests. In fact, in some cases only a rather expensive and complex (and somewhat time-consuming) analysis yields more precise results for certain substances than human senses.

Granted, that was a couple of decades ago, but while technology may progress fast, it doesn't progress SO fast that I'd believe it would make a huge jump in that respect.

Since I see no reason to disbelieve my mother's experience, technology that'd provide instant recognition of smells an order of magnitude better than a human nose's would be rather impressive indeed. I'd personally peg that as much more impressive than stuff like artificial muscle/bodies.

EDIT: now that I think about it, it's perfectly possible that AI bodies feel certain smells much more strongly than humans, and certain smells weakly or not at all. It would be very difficult to notice this difference in most everyday situations, I imagine. Say, if a human and an AI had a completely different subjective experience of the same smell due to registering different chemical components, it would not likely come up in conversation, unless a human and an AI were comparing two smells ("what do you MEAN those two smell alike?").

fayelovesbubbles:

--- Quote from: Zebediah on 09 Oct 2017, 19:48 ---Yeah, Bubbles has it bad.

We're going to have to deal with this sooner or later.

--- End quote ---

Duh! : D

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