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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
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| Brain Class | ||
| Class ten brain is the lowest. |
| "Why have you had no orders
this morning?" asked the fieldminder. "Because the radio issued none," said the unlocker, slowly rotating a dozen of its arms. "Because the radio station in the city was issued with no orders this morning," said the penpropeller. And there you had the distinction between a class six and a class three brain, which was what the unlocker and the pen-propeller possessed respectively. All machine brains worked with nothing but logic, but the lower the class of brain-class ten being the lowest-the more literal and less informative answers to questions tended to be. "You have a class three brain; I have a class three brain," the field-minder said to the penner. "We will speak to each other. This lack of orders is unprecedented. Have you further information on it?" "Yesterday orders came from the city. Today no orders have come. Yet the radio has not broken down. Therefore they have broken down," said the little penner. "The men have broken down?" "All men have broken down." "That is a logical deduction," said the field-minder. "That is the logical deduction," said the penner. "For if a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?" |
| Technovelgy from But Who Can Replace A Man,
by Brian Aldiss. Published by Infinity in 1958 Additional resources -
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
