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"If you have a gut response to a story, you are not responding to something new ..you are really responding to a story you were told when you were six or seven…"
- Samuel R. Delany
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| Living Machines | ||
| Robots that are able to learn. |
An interesting early treatment of the distinction between automated machinery and mechanisms that are capable of learning.
| "Man is not a machine in the purely
mechanical sense, though many of his
functions are demonstrably mechanical.
The ability to reason, however it has
evolved, whatever it may be at bottom,
whether a bewildering complexity of reflex actions or not, lifts man above the
dignity of — a machine. Does this imply
the impossibility of creating machines
(mechanical brains) that can profit by
experience, go through the processes
which we call thought? No; but it does
imply that such machines (however created) are no longer mere mechanisms.
There is here a dialectical process to be
reckoned with. Machines that 'learn'
are living machines."
Living machines ! I mouthed that phrase over and over to myself — and mouthing it I looked at the cylinders with increasing dread. They were machines. |
| Technovelgy from The Mentanicals,
by Francis Flagg. Published by Amazing Stories in 1934 Additional resources -
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'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
'The vast spinning sphere of Factory in the Sky loomed above and ahead of us, gleaming white against the unfathomable jet depths of surrounding space.'
'And if it doesn’t work,' inquired Lazarus, 'what does that make us? Sunspots?'
