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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Machine (Thinking Machine) | ||
| A very early reference to a thinking machine in charge of a planet. |
In this story of a future Earth, humanity had all of its needs met by a device - an intelligent machine.
| "You have forgotten your history, and you have forgotten the history of the Machine, humans..."
"On the planet Dwranl, of the star you know as Sirius, a great race lived, and they were not too unlike you humans. ...they attained their goal of the machine that could think. And because it could think, they made several and put them to work, largely on scientific problems, and one of the obvious problems was how to make a better machine which could think. The machines had logic, and they could think constantly, and because of their construction never forgot anything they thought it well to remember. So the machine which had been set the task of making a better machine advanced slowly, and as it improved itself, it advanced more and more rapidly. The Machine which came to Earth is that machine." |
| Technovelgy from The Machine,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1935 Additional resources -
|
Below, see humans gathered to sacrifice to The Machine.
(Sacrificing to The Machine)
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and Technology by John W. Campbell
Tech news articles related to The Machine
Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell
Machine (Thinking Machine)-related
news articles:
- SoundCloud's Hound Provides Conversational Interface (Video)
| Light Society: Simulates Earth-Scale Society With A Billion AI Agents |
| Collective Superintelligence Is At Hand! |
| AI Operates An Excavator |
| Grok And The City Fathers From 'Cities In Flight' By James Blish |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
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1940's 1950's
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
