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"We were essentially being shell-shocked by rapid change. That was one of the things you needed science-fiction writers for back in the Sixties, because we could cope with the future."
- Peter Watts
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| Conscious Farm Machines | ||
| Farm machinery that worked on their own. |
| In front of me, everything seemed alive; the huge plow, which had been standing near by the house without my having observed it in the night, seemed to shake itself, turn around, swung its arms, creaked - and began to move back southward whence it and we came, tearing up the vegetation, ploughing the ground beneath the wrenched-out plants and shrubs.
All around me were machines, busily at work, machines that threshed and winnowed grain... A picture of machines and no man to control or watch them! Machines that seemingly with full consciousness walked out into the fields to do their daily work. And even now there was no living being among them save myself... Had these machines in some incredible fashion been provided with brains?
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| Technovelgy from The Hidden Colony,
by Otfrid von Hanstein. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1935 Additional resources -
|
Here's a quick picture, as shown in the original magazine story:
(Conscious autonomous farm robot)
Compare to the automatic cultivators from Piracy Preferred (1930) by John W. Campbell, the robot farmer from The Turning Wheel (1954) by Philip K. Dick, the field minder from Who Can Replace A Man (1963) by Brian Aldiss, the Robomule from Bill the Galactic Hero (1965) by Harry Harrison, the self-guided tractor from At the Bottom of a Hole (1966) by Larry Niven, the robot crab from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson and the agricultural robot pest controller from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Hidden Colony
More Ideas
and Technology by Otfrid von Hanstein
Tech news articles related to The Hidden Colony
Tech news articles related to works by Otfrid von Hanstein
Conscious Farm Machines-related
news articles:
- John Deere Self-Driving Tractor
- Self-Driving Tractors From China Plan Ahead
- SF Writers Predicted John Deere Autonomous Tractors
| MK-V Smart Tractor - Fully Electric, Farmer Optional |
| Vertical Farm In Singapore's Output Is 1.5 Tons Per Day |
| Mashambas Skyscraper Farm Design Wins |
| Self-Driving Tractors From China Plan Ahead |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
