So, here are a few thoughts/ideas emerging from both the current arc and from the discussions on this thread:
Mrs W's Reaction
She decides that she can't get to know someone by 'phone and comes to Northampton. Where to stay? Why not with Claire's mother? Two lonely middle-aged women, one of whom has learned to get her party on. Faye learns the fine art of bailing her mother out of jail after starting yet another bar fight.
Ultimately, Mrs A and Mrs W ride off into the sunset together (Literally: It's a nice Gold Wing too)!
Babies
Jeph has said that he literally has no instinct for infants; even his nieces and nephews. I can see why that would make him reluctant to tackle the subject in QC. You can only write what you know, after all, and he literally doesn't know anything on this subject.
That said, he may decide to go out of his comfort zone if he decide to go out of his comfort zone if he feels the storyline really demands it. FWIW, I could see Tai agreeing to be surrogate for Marten and Claire's child (they're both dear friends and long-time collegues, after all). Dora would probably consider the thought awkward, what with her prior relationship with Marten. I could also see Marten agreeing to be surrogate for Dora and Tai's child, if they asked.
Synthetic Reproduction and the Singularity
It's been established that AI-to-AI sex is 'basically sending data packets' (as Faye put it to Pintsize). I wonder just how complex this interface is and whether, when interfaced in this manner, the two AIs algorithms may directly interact. Maybe when that happens, like human DNA during conception, the two algorithms create a merged duplicate that contains elements of both.
Normally, there is a firewall in place to prevent direct interaction between the two algorithms (the AI equivalent of 'safe sex'). However, if that is disabled or glitches, a new 'child AI' is created and stored in a partition of the "mother's" AI drive. Over the next few weeks, the child AI passively monitors sensory input and data processing of the mother process, growing in complexity until it becomes fully sapient. It can then be downloaded onto a chassis of some kind.
The first time this happened - the first time a synthetic was created by the interaction of two other synthetics without any human input involved - it met the criteria to be declared the 'singularity'.
Faybles Babies
There are two scenarios arising from this:
Bubbles is the mother. Using Yay's Direct Neural Interface headset, Faye and Bubbles have AI sex. A child algorithm is created in the normal manner that is a new creature - The product of the direct interaction of a human and AI mind on the processing level. In fullness of time, baby Cyba gets her own baby chassis, possibly a similar model to Momo-tan.
Faye is the mother. This option requires a lot more mad science and is thus less likely to be used. It requires Faye to be 'infected' by repair nanites that are programmed with Bubbles' physical parameters in some way. The nanites interact with one of Faye's ova and something not dissimilar to conception occurs. As the fetus grows, the nanites, still trying to carry out their 'repair Bubbles' hard-coded instruction set, modify it on the molecular level, adding synthetic components like silicon pathways augmenting the nervous system and maybe organic polymers in the skin, muscle fibres and bones. When baby Cyba is born, she is physically a perfectly-blended hybrid of a human child and a child-sized synthetic chassis.
Maybe both could happen in the same encounter and the intelligence algorithm in Bubbles' drive partition somehow installs onto the biomechanical 'chassis'. Yay knew this was a statistical probability but chose not to mention it because... well, there would be too many questions and their grand plan may have been derailed.
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Topic: WCDT strips 4281 to 4285 (8th to 12th June 2020) (Read 27285 times)