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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Field-Minder | ||
| An agricultural robot. |
It's lonely work out there in the fields; fortunately, the human beings give orders.
| The field-minder finished turning the top-soil of a two-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed on to the highway and looked back at its work... the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping or the long-lasting effects of nuclear bombardment.
It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its atomic pile which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet high, it gleamed complacently in the mild sunshine.
 ('But Who Can Replace A Man' by Brian W. Aldiss) |
| Technovelgy from But Who Can Replace A Man,
by Brian Aldiss. Published by Infinity in 1958 Additional resources -
|
It was able to communicate with robots in charge of warehouses; it could print out a card with its requirements.
This robot will probably need the services of the agricultural robot pest controller from the 1985 movie Runaway by Michael Crichton.
Compare to the automatic cultivators from Piracy Preferred (1930) by John W. Campbell, the conscious farm machines from The Hidden Colony (1935) by Otfrid von Hanstein, the robot farmer from The Turning Wheel (1954) by Philip K. Dick, the Robomule from Bill the Galactic Hero (1965) by Harry Harrison, the self-guided tractor from At the Bottom of a Hole (1966) by Larry Niven and the robot crab from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
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| Humanoid Robots Spotted In Homes Performing Household Chores |
| Bambot Open Source Cheap Delivery Robot |
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
