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"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Vulcan 3 | ||
| Artificially intelligent self-modifying supercomputer. |
In the near-future Earth of the novel, Vulcan 3 is the final authority for the people of the world.
| Ahead of him, lights switched on. Behind him, enormous reinforced doors slid shut to fill in the chamber's single entrance. The huge calculator rose in front of him, the immense tower of receptor banks and indicators. He was alone with it - alone with Vulcan 3.
 (Vulcan III) Very little of the computer was visible; its bulk disappeared into regions which he had never seen, which in fact no human had ever seen... Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface, to be carted off, and the variety, amount, and nature of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested. The financial cost of supporting Vulcan 3 was immense... At the latest estimate, Vulcan 3's share of the the taxes came to about forty-three percent. Beneath his feet the floor vibrated... What lay down there? Energy, tubes and pipes, wiring, transformers, self-contained machinery... He had a mental image of relentless activity... worn-out parts replaced, new parts invented; superior designs replaced obsolete designs. And how far had it spread? Miles? Vulcan 3 was aware of him. Across the vast impersonal face of metal an acknowledgment gleamed, a ribbon of fluid letters that appeared briefly and then vanished. |
| Technovelgy from Vulcan's Hammer,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Ace Books in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Vulcan 3 was named after the image created by its glowing power lines:
Director Jason Dill explained the rationale behind the construction of Vulcan 3:
...There was one answer. For years we had been using computers, giant constructs put together by the labor and talent of hundreds of trained experts, built to exact standards. Machines were free of the poisoning bias of self-interest and feeling that gnawed at man; they were capable of performing the objective calculations that for man would remain only an ideal, never a reality."
The games Machine from AE van Vogt's World of Null-A is a clear predecessor to the Vulcan 3 computer. Enjoy comparing Vulcan 3 to other computers large enough to run whole planets or societies: see the City Fathers from James Blish's Cities in Flight, Watchdog from Jack Haldeman's story of the same name, and Deep Thought from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
See also the way computers design computers in Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story The Feeling of Power and the synthetic intellect from The Machine That Thought (1939) by William Callahan.
The oldest reference I know about is the Government Machine from Mechanocracy (1932) by Miles J. Breuer.
...Power lines glowed red - the origin of the series name. The rumblings and dull flashes of red had reminded Nathaniel Greenstreet of the ancient god's forge, the lame god who had created the thunderbolts for Jupiter, in an age long past.
"But who would watch the Guardians? How could we be sure this supranational body would be free of the hate and bias, the animal passions that had set man against man throughout the centuries?
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Vulcan's Hammer
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to Vulcan's Hammer
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Vulcan 3-related
news articles:
- Robot Brain Grows As It Learns
- FAST Program AIs Search For Human 'Malintent'
- Google Engineers Not Sure What Google RankBrain AI Is Doing
- Google Now Expects Chips To Design Themselves
- Artificial Intelligence 'Dabus' Listed As Inventor, Granted Patent
- LLM 'Cognitive Core' Now Evolving
| 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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'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.'
