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"There's a tendency to think that maybe if we can just throw enough hardware at the AI problem, then evolution can take care of the rest. Certainly that's how God went about making us."
- Rudy Rucker
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| Automated Apartment Maintenance | ||
| Automated devices that would oversee the maintenance of a rented apartment. |
| Picking up the vidphone, he dialed 214, the extension for the maintenance circuit of the building. "Listen," he said, when the homeostatic entity answered. "I'm now in a position to divert some of my funds in the direction of settling my bill vis-a-vis your clean-up robots. I'd like them up here right now to go over my apt. I'll pay the full and entire bill when they're finished."
"Sir, you'll pay your full and entire bill before they start." |
| Technovelgy from Ubik,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, the Powered Suit with Trauma Maintenance from The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman, the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan, the Christmas Bush Motile Robot from Rocheworld (1985) by Robert Forward, the maritime robots from Mare Nostrum (2022) by Bruce Sterling and the maintenance drone (holon) from The Mountain in the Sea (2022) by Ray Naylor.
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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.'
