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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson
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| Emissarial Projection | ||
| An expert system able to converse and act in the capacity of ambassador. |
| "Do you know what an emissarial projection is...? It's when they send a tuned suite of queries and responses to a remote location, by light beam. To play the part of an emissary."
"...If we are to believe what we are told, the object they send is something like a library, transmitted by a signal laser. Suitably housed and emplaced within enabled equipment of sufficient capacity and complexity, this... entity, though it is simply a many-branched array of statements, questions and answers, with a set of rules governing the order in which they are expressed, is able to carry out what seems like an intelligent conversation. It is as close as one is allowed to to come to an artificial intelligence. |
| Technovelgy from The Algebraist,
by Iain M Banks. Published by Orbit in 2004 Additional resources -
|
A much simpler use of this idea was used in the film I, Robot; Dr. Lanning creates a hologram controlled by simple rules to act as his representative after his death.
(Dr. Lanning hologram from I, Robot)
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'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
'... the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words.'
'... underneath they consisted of networks of cooling tubes against the skin.'
'My cars talk to one another. I have no doubt about it...'
'... the imprint of her image on the telephoto cell.'
