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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
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![]() As far as I know, this is the first description of an autonomous car.
Eventually, the protagonist learns to use the car, named "Sappho", and succeeds in setting the destination:
My derogatory epithets were pure fun, for the car was trim and swift-looking, and its machinery in the most perfect order, as far as I could tell by its sound and its performance. I continued to talk to it as I got in and studied the dials. I went to work carefully to set them. It was like working the combination of a big safe. There were four for directions, and a distance dial to set each time between them, while the left hand handled the speed dial simultaneously during the entire time. A little pointer traveled on a chart all the while, to check up the setting as well as to assist in determining directions and distances from a map when these were unknown to the driver. The study of this map provided me with much subsequently useful knowledge of the island and the cities...
With a soft, rustling sound of its marvelous mechanism, the little green-black car glided out of the garage and into the street. I was as elated as a child with a new toy, at having succeeded in operating it on my own initiative.
“Attaboy Sappho!” I applauded.
There was even a provision for taking back control of an autonomous car without a steering wheel:
The only explanation that I could possibly think of was that I had made some mistake in Betting the dials. Yet, that was not altogether plausible. I could readily see how I might have made some minor error which could have gotten me off the track a little. But this sort of behavior would necessitate a radical and fundamental error; and I felt sure that I knew more about them than to have set them completely backwards.
I reached for the levers that were used to drive the car by “actual control” as the people called it; that is, to control each movement individually; and I tried to turn it around. There was a good deal of grinding and knocking in the mechanism, and much irregularity in the car’s progress; but it continued its course back home, and would not answer to my efforts. Therefore, I decided that something had gone wrong with the mechanism.
Dr. David H. Keller, MD, also described at length an autonomous car in his 1935 story The Living Machine:
"And that is just one more reason why the average human being should not be allowed to drive such a powerful machine!" he mused to himself. "it has taken the combined intelligence of all the scientists of modern time to perfect the automobile and yet it is sold to and driven by any moronic fool who is able to gather together the few dollars necessary to buy a secondhand one."
[Now, let's see what he created in response to this incident.]
"Nothing new about this," laughed Babson, scornfully. "One of our best and most familiar models."
"How about the steering wheel?"
"Where is it?"
"I do not need one. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Now watch me. We are going into traffic..."
Compare to the Automatic Control Car from Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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