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"Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes."
- William Gibson
 |
| Semi-Conducting Graphite-Gel | ||
| Computer brain structured like animal brain. |
In the story, the wheelies are learning robots.
| ...in the actual living animal brain, the whole system of synapses, neurons and connecting fibers was there to start with, and repeated activity would produce useful patterns, but with the wheelies' undifferentiated mass of semi-conducting graphite-gel it was more like the lining up of polarized particles in a magnetic field. |
| Technovelgy from Callahan and the Wheelies,
by Stephen Barr. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1960 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the positronic brain from Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story Reason and the Artificial Brain from Edmond Hamilton's 1926 story The Metal Giants.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Callahan and the Wheelies
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and Technology by Stephen Barr
Tech news articles related to Callahan and the Wheelies
Tech news articles related to works by Stephen Barr
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| 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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'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
'Our planes are going to start bringing in bales of discarded plastics...'
'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'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.'
