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"One can see the free software movement as a precusor for a "free hardware" or "free wetware" movement--one that will provide free libraries of designs for biological or nanotechnological products that replicators can be programmed to churn out."
- Charles Stross
 |
| No Human Programmers | ||
| The idea that computers are too complicated and too important to be programmed by human beings. |
This is an early direct reference to this idea.
| There are nine people on the Council. I don’t know why, though the BC might tell me if I asked, since it nominates and elects Council members. I’ve always fancied it’s so in case we ever screw up so totally that the universe does come apart at the seams and all eras coexist, we can field a team in the Never-neverland World Series.
Technically it’s called the Programmers’ Council. That’s a polite fiction. They don’t do any programming. Computers long ago grew too complex and too accurate to allow a mere human to fuck around with their instructions. Yet there are qualities no one has ever succeeded in placing into the memory banks. Don’t ask me what they are. Imagination might be one of them, empathy another. Or I could just be giving the human race credit for more than it deserves. Maybe the BC supports and maintains the Council to keep itself in check, to prevent it from actually becoming God. There is that hazard. Possibly the BC needs an element of fool-hardiness and prejudice and meanness and ornery self-interest to give it perspective. Or maybe, like the rest of us, it just needs a giggle now and then. |
| Technovelgy from Millennium,
by John Varley. Published by Berkley Books in 1983 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the City Fathers from Cities in Flight (1950's) by James Blish and Vulcan 3 from Vulcan's Hammer (1960) by Philip K. Dick.
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'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
'Briquet’s head seemed to think that to find and attach a new body to her head was as easy as to fit and sew a new dress.'
'...copy was turned out in a charming and entirely feminine handwriting.'
'It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast...'
'He then started hand movements of definite pattern...'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain...'
