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"Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the second world war we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization."
- William Gibson
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| Inorganic Evolution | ||
| A process by which robots could alter their own structure, or the ways that they interact with other robots, to adapt to a changing world. |
Lem is not suggesting that robots could create themselves from metal and other materials spontaneously. In the novel, he hypothesizes how an adaptable swarm of very simple machines could have evolved from the homeostatic robots of a highly advanced society.
He begins by hypothesizing that the original ancestors of the swarm of nanomachines were various robots from a Lyre scout ship.
| "The robots were unharmed and left the ship. They were highly specialized homeostatic mechanisms, capable of withstanding the most difficult environmental conditions...
We'd have to assume, of course, that these machines were capable of producing other machines according to their specific needs of the moment. ...the robots would have perfectly adapted to life on the continents of the planet. ...Hundreds of generations later the 'offspring' of the first mechanisms were no longer anything like the first products created by the Lyre civilization. Do you follow me? It was the beginning of an evolution of nonliving things, an evolution of machines." |
| From The Invincible,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Poland in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Lem also argues that, in the event of machine evolution, the larger and more complex robots created by organic beings (like ourselves) would fare poorly against simpler machine forms, at least partly because of energy requirements:
"In this battle, the 'intellectually' superior mechanisms, which needed considerable amounts of energy (not least, because of their size), were no match for the more economical and more productive machines -"
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'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'Holodeck 4 was waiting to be programmed...'
'... he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'I stood in line for half an hour for this, and it's just a blob!'
'A young man... advanced with nervous strides along the gravel path which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber.'
'... we'll give him in his brain what he needs for creation.'
'Rapidly, purposefully, the metallic fingers moved over the key-boards...'
'...vast man-made disk of metal set spinning about the sun to supply the Earth with power.'
