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"It's also important to vary your stimuli. I always look for new things to shock the system. Just as you make muscles grow by shocking them, you make the mind grow by shocking it."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Robot Psyche Tester | ||
| An automated psychiatric evaluation device. |
It's important to have objective information about your mental state. Who better to decide than a robot?
| The robot psyche tester whirred, integrating and gestalting. At last its color code lights changed from red to green.
"Well?" Hall demanded. "Severe disturbance. Instability ratio up above ten." "That's over danger?" "Yes. Eight is danger. Ten is unusual, especially for a person with your index. You usually show about a four... If you could give me more data-" Hall set his jaw. "I can't tell you any more." "It's illegal to hold back information during a psyche test," the machine said peevishly. "If you do that you deliberately distort my findings." |
| From Colony,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953 Additional resources -
|
Compare this device with the machine psychologist from James Blish's Cities in Flight, the mechanotherapist from Bad Medicine (a 1956 Robert Sheckley story) and the more complex Dr. Smile, from Dick's 1964 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
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'A worker replaced by a nubot... had to be compensated.'
'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers.'
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
