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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

Office Hand  
  A robotic hand with each finger customized for a different function.  

Would you really want to be this efficient?

...the titanium weave and carbonic fibers of the dead man's prosthetic hand glimmered in the dim light that infused the alley unencumbered by the ancestral wistfulness of human skin.

It was work as fine and precise as Whispr had ever seen. The bonding of metal and carbon fiber to wrist bone, tendons and muscles was seamless... In addition to permitting basic grasping, each finger had been further customized to perform a different task, from airscribing to communications. The hand of the dead man had been turned into a veritable five-digited portable office.

Technovelgy from The Human Blend, by Alan Dean Foster.
Published by Del Rey in 2010
Additional resources -

Compare to the mechanical hand from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Philip Nowlan (w/D. Calkins), microhands from Microhands (Микроруки) (1931) by Boris Zhitkov, iron fingers from The Death's Head Meteor (1931) by Neil R. Jones, robot hands from The Iron World (1937) by Otis Adelbert Kline, waldoes from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, robot surgeon-hand from War Veteran (1955) by Philip K. Dick, robotic hand from The Door Into Summer (1956) by Robert Heinlein, interchangeable hands from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick and the surgical hand from Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) by Philip K. Dick.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Human Blend
  More Ideas and Technology by Alan Dean Foster
  Tech news articles related to The Human Blend
  Tech news articles related to works by Alan Dean Foster

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