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"I think engineering will supply our demand for a "spiritual" life after meat death."
- Bart Kosko
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| Self-Maintaining Circuit Monitoring and Repair | ||
| A computer that monitors itself for repair. |
| Stranton put down his pencil, wadded up a sheaf of scratch papers, and began telling himself that it was time to go home. The others had long since checked out, leaving him to toy with The Gimmick. The Gimmick was the pet name given to a special engineering problem which one or another of his staff — and a great many other staffs — had pondered hopelessly for years. The problem was to design a practical, self-maintaining circuit monitoring and repairing device which, when installed in a computer bank, would solve the incredibly complex maintenance problems of such instruments. Well, thought Stranton rising from his drawing desk, there’s no hurry. Human labor is going to be cheap enough for a good many years yet to make the enormously expensive Gimmick a purely academic study. |
| Technovelgy from Gramp and his Dog,
by Frank Quattrocchi. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, the self-repairing robot from Accidental Flight (1952) by W.F. Wallace, the blue collar robot from The Velvet Glove (1956) by Harry Harrison, the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan and the repair drone from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
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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.'
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'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...'
