Quote from: Ronoc on May 18, 2019, 03:40:50 PM
It's not nonsense that they can make them, is nonsense that they bother to. Unless it's a significant improvement over a real dog, there'd be no point. And the one in that story seemed no superior to any old dog.
If you have to grow them as DNA dictates, but can 'program' them later, then for security, or sense of smell, gotta go bear...
Quote from: The Old One on May 18, 2019, 04:34:02 AM
Probably because Synthetics
are grown, much as Replicants are.
And it's far from nonsense, as far as the universe of Alien is concerned.
The bear idea is a good counterargument actually. And yeah, it does seem like too much work to make a robo dog like that. Just lets not forget one thing. It's the future, so as long as power sources have improved and manufacturing is at an all time high, you can literally make anything you want.
Synthetics can live longer probably, if not indefinitely. They don't get sick, maybe it turns out that it's cheaper to power a robo dog than feed an actual one. Maybe some people just like the company of dogs more than creepy fake humans and synthetic bears.
In a crazy out of control capitalist world, any and all whims will be satisfied eventually if they are profitable.
Quote from: Nrmiller on May 19, 2019, 05:43:13 AM
Quote from: TC on May 18, 2019, 12:54:57 PM
Quote from: Nrmiller on May 18, 2019, 01:09:45 AM
If you want to get real Ellison style dark with it, imagine that they're made from the same sort of line as the full human style synths, with the same capacity for thought, but none of the physical bits that allow them to express it. I imagine WY is a pretty cheap place, they'd probably give little thought to popping an off the shelf human-ish mind into a machine built like a dog. Easier cheaper and so what if it suffers so long as it works.
Do you mean Harlan Ellison-style dark?
Then that would be synthetic canine Maggie as Blood, the telepathic dog from Ellison's book A Boy And His Dog, who helps his friend Vic hunt down women to rape and cannibalise as food in a post-apocalyptic world of the future.
I'll pass on that one.
TC
More the existential nihilism of I Have No Mouth. A human level intelligence stuck in a canine form. Unable to understand or express its own limitations.
Not saying that is in this short, or even mildly hinted at, just stringing and extrapolating from the general capitalist driven laziness of corporate greed shoved into overdrive by WY.
That's some Black Mirror level of wrong. Like it. I can get behind it. Could make sense if written carefully. It would have to be either a secret from the public, or somehow the public must be convinced that there is no suffering happening here. Still, eventually like in Black Mirror, people will find out about that, rights activists will pop up and things will be resolved. And then the Autons...
There's a good story hidden in this proposal IMO