Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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NewsReaction AI & Technology

Back to episode — Episode 2637 CWSA 10/23/24

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more you look at the news, the more you hate people. You probably know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. You didn't really need a study for that. You could have just asked me. "Scott, we were going to spend a bunch of money on a study to find out if watching the news makes you hate people." And I would say yes. If you spend five minutes looking at the news... well, no, we have…

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whole study? Unnecessary.

Meanwhile, according to SciTech, this will sound like the smallest story. Way bigger than you think it is. Way bigger. Apparently science has been trying to create an artificial nose for a long time, and they can kind of do it, but it's really complicated and has lots of components and stuff. But apparently now there's a way to make a simplified, very effective way to use some kind of an antenna and send out some kind of a signal and see what kind of a signal you get back, and that will tell you what smells or gases are in the air. And it does it really well. So pretty soon your robots are going to be able to smell things.

This is a bigger deal for me because I don't have a sense of smell. I lost my sense of smell some time ago. And if I had a robot in my house, I would want the robot to be able to know if there's a gas leak because, you know, the gas leak smells like rotten eggs, but I can't smell it. I was once, years ago in my first marriage, I was in a condo and stepkids were doing their thing and I was doing my thing and my ex was out for the day doing whatever. And she comes home and she walks in the door and she's like, "My God, open the windows. The house is going to blow up. It's filled with gas." And I said, "Really?" Couldn't smell a thing. But she could. And so we managed to not blow up the entire block. But there had been, I think, the pilot or something on the oven was on. So yes, I need a robot that can smell some stuff.

They might even be able to sniff out disease. But think of the other things it could do. Imagine if you had thi

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s smelling antenna in your location and then some criminals come in and they do some crimes but there's no video. Would it be possible to use the electronic nose to then get a sample from the person should you ever catch them and see if they're guilty based on their smell? Because you may have recorded their smell at the location and there would be... it's probably like a fingerprint. So there's a…

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