Questionable Content 14: "I Deserve A Fancy Butt Emblem."

[Kish]

I definitely don't think AIs are supposed to be particularly tied to upper classes. As Momo noted, they barely have civil rights--Jeph's arguably undermining that with the introduction of a certain near-omnipotent AI aside.

But May isn't the exception. Momo is working class, Bubbles has gone between criminal class and working class, Pintsize and Winslow have a job that has no real-world analogue but I wouldn't map it to anything higher-paying than a live-in maid.

[Fawkes]

So after checking Twitter it appears that the message of today's comic is that Jeph believes himself to be on the autism spectrum.

[Shadow of the Sun]

Checks out. We know Jeph has pretty bad OCD, and OCD and ASD are often comorbid (I've got OCD and Aspergers, for example) so I'm not surprised.

[Keltest]

Checks out. We know Jeph has pretty bad OCD, and OCD and ASD are often comorbid (I've got OCD and Aspergers, for example) so I'm not surprised.

Honestly, I think Brun could be one of the more interesting characters. Hanners was drawn from his real experiences and was handled well. He has shown he can write what he knows pretty well. If we could just give renee the boot...

[Mith]

On a slightly different note, the current strip has me wondering just how common AIs are in the QC universe, and what the broader effects of having all these new people around would be. I mean, here we have Kevin, an embodied AI, working as a bank teller. That's an extremely ordinary job and it doesn't appear to relate to any special circumstances like May's convenience store work (which clearly relates to her legal situation, she had a far more high-end function before). Is the AI population of Northampton 5%, 10%? It's really unclear and it keeps getting stranger as time goes on how little detail exists surrounding this cataclysmic change in everyday life the strip presents.

What is the buying power, so to speak, of AI? I've never done the maths to see if power consumption (especially with a higher amount of AIs) ends up being cheaper than food and water for people. If so, could you see AIs without Mays criminal past or Momo's specialty chassis having less expenses and therefore taking lower pay than humans would?

[Maryring]

It probably wouldn't be legal to pay AI less than an equivalent fleshy worker. If for no other reason than it'd be condemning about the entire human working population to unemployment, and no one wants that.

[Mith]

It probably wouldn't be legal to pay AI less than an equivalent fleshy worker. If for no other reason than it'd be condemning about the entire human working population to unemployment, and no one wants that.

That's what I figure as well. Although since AI have job markets that us wetware sentiences do not (they can lend processing power), there may be ways for AI to not just be more citizenery competing for the same job market.

Although it could be an interesting take in a different universe of "automation taking our jobs". Autos gained sentience and unionised.

[John Cribati]

I'm personally glad that this AI Future is about the furthest thing possible from the one presented in that Detroit game.

I mean, the racism metaphor is still in there somewhere but in Detroit it so ham-fisted they may as well have been slapping the player with an entire pig.

[Cikomyr]

I'm personally glad that this AI Future is about the furthest thing possible from the one presented in that Detroit game.

I mean, the racism metaphor is still in there somewhere but in Detroit it so ham-fisted they may as well have been slapping the player with an entire pig.

But is that such a bad thing?

Theres a lot of memorable message media that are incredibly ham fisted. Doesn't mean they were wrong

[Mith]

I'm personally glad that this AI Future is about the furthest thing possible from the one presented in that Detroit game.

I mean, the racism metaphor is still in there somewhere but in Detroit it so ham-fisted they may as well have been slapping the player with an entire pig.

But was it as Ham Fisted as Brian Blessed hitting you with a pig while shouting "BACON!"?

[John Cribati]

There were separate compartments for androids at the back of the bus.

[Fawkes]

Press X to I Have a Dream

[John Cribati]

That was literally an option at one point, too.

[Cikomyr]

There were separate compartments for androids at the back of the bus.

Or you know, the orange robots living in separate places than the blue robots' ghetto.

Just because something is wild, ham-fisted and purely fantastical doesn't mean there's not a solid, grounded reason that justifies the message to be said.

I ain't seen non-controversial people making social change. People doing the real change always happen to be "too rash", "too obnoxious", "too ham-fisted".

[John Cribati]

Except for the part where David Cage insists that he just wanted to make a game/story about androids and nothing is meant to mirror any real life events, despite using direct imagery from both the civil rights movement and the Holocaust.

[Fawkes]

The most recent Deus Ex game did the same thing, with the marketing team swearing up and down that 'Aug Lives Matter' was in no way inspired by or referencing any actual political movement, no sir.

[John Cribati]

In any case my main point is that, given how we treat our non-sentient household machines now, I fail to see a future where we treat sentient, human-shaped machines like dirt. At the most, I can see "racism" against androids as them being tired of humans seeing them as children or pets.

[Vinyadan]

In any case my main point is that, given how we treat our non-sentient household machines now, I fail to see a future where we treat sentient, human-shaped machines like dirt. At the most, I can see "racism" against androids as them being tired of humans seeing them as children or pets.

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars


Anyway, I think that this thread explores a lot more details about AIs than the comic ever will. I talk about understanding the world of QC as future-shocked and so on, the influence of AIs on the work market... I think that Jeff simply had a moment in which he realised that he had electronic human beings in his comic, and began writing about them using "electronic" similarly to an ethnic/identity (religious, sexual) background.

[Kish]

I wonder if that guy on the QC forum who flatly refused to take in anything and everything that might suggest that Pintsize had more rights than the desktop computer I'm typing this on still posts there. The Faye/Bubbles romance would certainly have strained his comprehension of the comic...

Anyway, I'm sure that if the real world experienced a sudden "there are now tons of sapient robots walking around, but they're not a threat or about to seize more power than they're legally given" massive technological leap forward--ignoring the logical impossibility of one area of technology advancing that much abruptly for the sake of the example--there would be a lot of people who would, like that guy, loudly say, and vote on the principle, "RIGHTS? They're machines, you idiots!"

[jwhouk]

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars


Anyway, I think that this thread explores a lot more details about AIs than the comic ever will. I talk about understanding the world of QC as future-shocked and so on, the influence of AIs on the work market... I think that Jeff simply had a moment in which he realised that he had electronic human beings in his comic, and began writing about them using "electronic" similarly to an ethnic/identity (religious, sexual) background.

Well, that situation in AZ was legit after the incident where a homeless person was killed by a self-driving Uber.

Oh, and it's Jeph.

[Max_Killjoy]

I wonder if that guy on the QC forum who flatly refused to take in anything and everything that might suggest that Pintsize had more rights than the desktop computer I'm typing this on still posts there. The Faye/Bubbles romance would certainly have strained his comprehension of the comic...

Anyway, I'm sure that if the real world experienced a sudden "there are now tons of sapient robots walking around, but they're not a threat or about to seize more power than they're legally given" massive technological leap forward--ignoring the logical impossibility of one area of technology advancing that much abruptly for the sake of the example--there would be a lot of people who would, like that guy, loudly say, and vote on the principle, "RIGHTS? They're machines, you idiots!"

There's another webcomic, Forward, that features AI heavily, and there's this guy who relentlessly hammers on his "appliances don't have rights" hobby-horse regarding the AIs.

Of course, he works in an industry that has hijacked the term "artificial intelligence" to mean "we made a really nice computer that's good at something".

[Wraith]

I wonder if that guy on the QC forum who flatly refused to take in anything and everything that might suggest that Pintsize had more rights than the desktop computer I'm typing this on still posts there. The Faye/Bubbles romance would certainly have strained his comprehension of the comic...

I mean, there's literally a comic wherein Momo is reading a book with the approximate title of "What Civil Rights We Willingly Gave To The AI's" and it ends with her crying tears of gratitude and hugging Marigold. It's hardly something that's up for debate, even before May was introduced and explored the concept of illegal AI prejudice while she was job hunting.

As for Brun/Jeph... I'm honestly mildly surprised that there hasn't been slightly more of a backlash. Self-diagnosing any kind of ongoing medical problem, let alone something as intimate and potentially sensitive as neurological conditions, rarely meets with much credence on the internet and I'm kind of concerned that its going to lead to stereotypes and cliches based on google searches rather than medical advice.

"Brun is autistic because I say she is" is a perfectly good way to write and I applaud that confidence and positive use of the platform. "Brun is autistic because I kinda of think I am too, despite not having it confirmed and with a laundry list of other neurological problems in my background to boot" feels like it could backfire if handled with anything less than absolute care.

[Maryring]

Re: Detroit. The problem there really isn't that David Cage is or isn't trying to tell a racial segregation allegory with robots. The problem is that it's extremely bad. If this were a musical composition, David Cage would be the guy smashing a violin repeatedly, while insisting he's just doing a percussion performance of the Devil's Tril.

[Vinyadan]

About self-diagnosis, I don't really have a feeling about it, in this case. It is something I would dissuade people from IRL, and I generally see it as a weird kind of do-it-yourself broscience with good chances of completely missing the problem and therefore not solving it, and possibly worsening it. But Jeff is a grown-ass man with a wife, a dog, and a job -- not just a job: a business! So it looks like this (potential) condition isn't really hurting him right now, and he has looked for docs when the damaging (potential) symptoms arose. And he lives in a country with a normal approach to health care, so he could get checked if he wanted to (which makes it odd that he didn't, but that's his own business).

About the writing quality, I don't think it matters how Jeff gets his info. If his mum gives him input, that should be sufficient as fact-checking. The problem with Brun is how her character fails to "pick up speed" (doing things, being interesting...). She has something going on in this strip, which is cool, but that took a number of strips about Renee, one of them featuring Renee recapping the previous day's strip.
She had a good page when she sniffed Clinton, though.

There's also something I find really odd about the portrayal of menace of violence, and the persistence of that harpoon.

[Keltest]

About self-diagnosis, I don't really have a feeling about it, in this case. It is something I would dissuade people from IRL, and I generally see it as a weird kind of do-it-yourself broscience with good chances of completely missing the problem and therefore not solving it, and possibly worsening it. But Jeff is a grown-ass man with a wife, a dog, and a job -- not just a job: a business! So it looks like this (potential) condition isn't really hurting him right now, and he has looked for docs when the damaging (potential) symptoms arose. And he lives in a country with a normal approach to health care, so he could get checked if he wanted to (which makes it odd that he didn't, but that's his own business).

About the writing quality, I don't think it matters how Jeff gets his info. If his mum gives him input, that should be sufficient as fact-checking. The problem with Brun is how her character fails to "pick up speed" (doing things, being interesting...). She has something going on in this strip, which is cool, but that took a number of strips about Renee, one of them featuring Renee recapping the previous day's strip.
She had a good page when she sniffed Clinton, though.

There's also something I find really odd about the portrayal of menace of violence, and the persistence of that harpoon.

Im willing to chock up the harpoon to Jeph not having quite decided on what he wanted to do with her yet. He definitely has a habit of throwing in a bunch of characters because they look cool, and then running into the problem of needing to give them, well, a character.

[Beelzebub1111]

As the bombs dropped, and nuclear fire engulfed the city, the two were vaporized instantly in a single white flash. Not even ashes remained.

[Kato]

As the bombs dropped, and nuclear fire engulfed the city, the two were vaporized instantly in a single white flash. Not even ashes remained.

What a beautiful ending... Sniff. So since this likely destroyed the city next year we will have the adventures of... Hannes, Winslow.. And Angus?

I really don't feel like discussing the Brun thing in depth but in short.. I'm very much not a fan of selfdiagnosis, and as someone who knows a few (teenage) autistics, I feel like Brun is maybe not an unrealistic but clichéd portrayal. I don't dislike her, but she's basically just hitting all the notes I've come to expect from a fictional autistic.

[dps]

The thing with Brun is that it seems that we're being asked to like her, or at least accept her as a character, because she has some sort of mental or emotional problem. Whether or not she's autistic, and whatever we feel about self-diagnosis, isn't really relevant--the problem is that a lot of us never have liked her in the first place. Contrast how Hanners was introduced--most people found her instantly likable, so that when we started getting information about her condition, we cared. With Brun, a lot of us simply don't care--we just want her current arc to be over, so we can go back to reading about characters that we like and care about.

[Shadow of the Sun]

...yeah, but a lot of the things that make her 'unlikable' are that she's codified as autistic.

I'm autistic (Asperger's, specifically). I wasn't diagnosed until two years ago when I was 25. And I like Brun as a character because seeing a character that is like me with an actual sense of nuance about her is actually nice because it really doesn't happen a lot, at least not one that's portrayed mostly positively.

[Wraith]

...yeah, but a lot of the things that make her 'unlikable' are that she's codified as autistic.

I don't think that is universally true. The reason that I didn't like her is that when she was first introduced she threatened Clinton with shotgun (which then magically transmuted into a harpoon, as if that was much better) for virtually no reason.

I like Clinton. I don't like strangers who react completely irrationally to him and threaten to enact cartoonish levels of violent threat upon him. Also she drinks warm beer, which is just deviant regardless of what you've been diagnosed with.

None of that is anything to do with her being autistic, and I have grown to like her more and more as time has gone on. In fact, we've been shown how out-of-character that introduction was to the point that it probably shouldn't be counted against her any more.
Similarly, some of the things that I *do* like about her are rooted in aspects of her condition - her "leap of logic" showing how she got from discussing celebrities to a factoid about neutron stars was a lovely little bit of storytelling that told you a lot about her.

Honestly, the worst thing about her is the company that she keeps, which even as we speak is being explored a bit more and has potential to improve.