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"To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer."
- Robert Heinlein

Fixing Machines  
  Machines that fix machines.  

Well, this robot idear was like a lot of other idears — it had a catch in it. Folks began to wonder if they’d saved so much labor after all; seemed as though they was losin’ about as much as they was savin’, what with the time they had to spend just keeping all those tarnation machines fixed up and repaired.

They began to ask themselves, ‘What’s the use of having all these here labor-savin’ devices, when we got to be up half the night tinkering with ’em?’ “But pretty soon, up popped another smart-Aleck, and he says, says he, ‘Whither are we driftin’? The machines are gettin’ us down,’ he says. ‘Let’s build some machines which will fix all these here machines for us!’

“Then it was tallyho and alley oop and off went the whole passel of mankind, buildin’ machines that would fix all the robots and the other machines when they busted down. While they was at it — just so’s they wouldn’t get in too deep — they built the fixing machines so’s they could fix themselves when they busted down. You see, that saved ’em from building still more machines to fix the machines that was going to fix the machines that was Well, they wouldn’t ’a’ been an end to it, otherwise..."


(Fixing Machines crash in "Frankenstein - Unlimited" by H.A. Highstone)

"...they was so dummed many machines cavortin’ and whizzin’ around in the streets and through the air that they was forever colliding with one another. A man’s life wasn’t safe. Here’d come a machine goin’ up to Canada, maybe, to bring back pine needles for a Ladies’ Aid pageant, and right over St. Louis or somewhere, it’d get in the way of another machine runnin’ an errand. Bein’ machines, of course, they didn’t have any sense ; they just took the shortest path no matter what happened.

Technovelgy from Frankenstein - Unlimited, by H.A. Highstone.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936
Additional resources -

Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Frankenstein - Unlimited
  More Ideas and Technology by H.A. Highstone
  Tech news articles related to Frankenstein - Unlimited
  Tech news articles related to works by H.A. Highstone

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