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Science Fiction
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"I'm a fairly visual thinker. In doing science, I think in terms of pictures of things happening, and then do the mathematics."
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![]() As far as I know, the earliest use of the phrase "electronic brain" in science fiction. As you will see, the author does not assert that it thinks for itself as a person does.
It was time to activate the electronic brain within the robot:
“Look!”
He was pointing to the left arm of the mechanism...
I could no longer deny that the thing was emerging mentally from that black slough of non-existence into a queer kind of inorganic consciousness.
Those first arm motions were slow, purposeless; then they gradually became more vigorous and directed...
How did the brain work?
No, the Brain wouldn’t have to be taught, he declared; and before that night was over I fully agreed with him...
NOW it came clumping across the laboratory floor with this platinum pot, placing it on the workbench, underneath and in the full illumination of an overhanging electric bulb.
Martery’s excitement reached fever heat.
“Heavens!” he gasped, between teeth that were still clenched on the stem of his long-dead pipe. “It’s going to mix up something!”
The created material opens up a rift in space. Both men are pulled into it. The brain and its robot body disappear. The author speculates:
Or possibly the Brain’s consciousness had its real existence in some outer space. Perhaps the beryl crystal was but some integral part of a vaster organism projected into our three dimensioned space, a feeler or tentacle, extending along a fourth dimension, which it had chosen to withdraw.
Thus I reasoned. And on top of this came the sudden discovery that my hands and arms — in fact all parts of my body — were invisible to me. I held my hands over my eyes. They in no way impaired that strange sense of vision, for I could still see that ash-gray plane stretching infinitely away in all directions from me.
Compare to the computer brain from The Cosmic Blinker (1953) by Eando Binder, Multivac from Franchise (1955) by Isaac Asimov and the Central Computer from The City and the Stars (1956) by Arthur C. Clarke. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
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'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
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