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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
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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." |
| 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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Tech news articles related to The Invincible
Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
Inorganic Evolution-related
news articles:
- SYMBRION - Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms
| Terrifying Robotic Apple Harvester |
| Jetson-Style Clockwork Robot Nail Salon Coming To Target Near You |
| Mechanical Horse Sculpture Gallops In Place |
| Hotels Turn To Robots As Human Workers Regroup |
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'The pokkecon rang again. *The coffee’s for him?* Tsuyoshi said.'
The Jetsons imagined so much future.
'Rod placed the brain inside the panel... the horse raised its head, wiggled its ears, blinked twice, gave a tentative whinny.'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Chain of hotels that specialized in non-human service.'
'But then... not every bulldozer operator works on the Moon.'
'Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse.'
