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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke

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.

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

Compare to the interchangeable hands from Philip K. Dick's 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and the robot surgeon-hand from Dick's 1955 short story War Veteran.

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  More Ideas and Technology from The Human Blend
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