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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Robot Librarian Filer | ||
| A device that works as a librarian, automatically filing books in the stacks. |
Filer 13B-445-K, robot librarian, had interests unlike those of any robot before him.
| A Filer is an amazingly intelligent robot and there aren't many being manufactured. You'll find them only in the greatest libraries, dealing with only the largest and most complex collections. To call them simply librarians is to demean all librarians and to call their work simple. Of course very little intelligence is needed to shelve books or stamp cards, but this sort of work has long been handled by robots that are little more than wheeled IBM machines. The cataloging of human information has always been an incredibly complex task. The Filer robots were the ones who finally inherited the job. It rested easier on their metallic shoulders, than it ever had on the rounded ones of human librarians. |
| Technovelgy from The Robot Who Wanted to Know,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Pyramid Books in 1962 Additional resources -
|
It turns out that the robot librarian Filers could do more than just shelve books, or help you find one.
Compare to the automatic delivery library from The Lord of Tranerica Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
resources: Robot Librarian Filer-related
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Besides a complete memory, Filer had other attributes that are usually connected to the human brain. Abstract connections for one thing. If it was asked for books on one subject, he could think of related books in other subjects that might be referred to. He could take a suggestion, pyramid it into a category, then produce tactile results in the form of a mountain of books.
More Ideas
and Technology from The Robot Who Wanted to Know
More Ideas
and Technology by Harry Harrison
Tech news articles related to The Robot Who Wanted to Know
Tech news articles related to works by Harry Harrison
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- Meet Hugh, Your Robot Librarian
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
