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- Greg Bear
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| Inorganic Evolution | ||
| A process by which robots could alter their own structure, or the ways that they interact with other robots, to adapt to a changing world. |
Lem is not suggesting that robots could create themselves from metal and other materials spontaneously. In the novel, he hypothesizes how an adaptable swarm of very simple machines could have evolved from the homeostatic robots of a highly advanced society.
He begins by hypothesizing that the original ancestors of the swarm of nanomachines were various robots from a Lyre scout ship.
| "The robots were unharmed and left the ship. They were highly specialized homeostatic mechanisms, capable of withstanding the most difficult environmental conditions...
We'd have to assume, of course, that these machines were capable of producing other machines according to their specific needs of the moment. ...the robots would have perfectly adapted to life on the continents of the planet. ...Hundreds of generations later the 'offspring' of the first mechanisms were no longer anything like the first products created by the Lyre civilization. Do you follow me? It was the beginning of an evolution of nonliving things, an evolution of machines." |
| Technovelgy from The Invincible,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Poland in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Lem also argues that, in the event of machine evolution, the larger and more complex robots created by organic beings (like ourselves) would fare poorly against simpler machine forms, at least partly because of energy requirements:
"In this battle, the 'intellectually' superior mechanisms, which needed considerable amounts of energy (not least, because of their size), were no match for the more economical and more productive machines -"
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
