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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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| Speed Belt (Ribbon Conveyor) | ||
| A great moving belt carrying people between cities. |
| There was a glitter of metal and vita-crystal dwellings that stood four-square to the sun and the winds. A broad ribbon-conveyor hurled its shining length in ceaseless rush down the narrow valley. Human beings—normal homely Earth men with the ordinary number of legs and arms, with honest-to-God faces and warm living flesh, were seated on the conveyor-benches as they flashed by. Hilary could have wept with delight. It was two years since he had seen his own kind; two years since Hurley's tragic misstep through the breach in the air-lock made by a meteor as they were nearing Mars.
Hilary leaped on the slow-moving ramp, skilfully worked his way across the graded speed belts until he was on the express conveyor that led straight on to New York. He sank into a cushioned seat next to an oldish man with iron-gray hair through which the speed of their flight whipped and pulled. |
| Technovelgy from Slaves of Mercury,
by Nat Schachner. Published by Astounding Stories in 1932 Additional resources -
|
Predates the more famous rolling roads from Heinlein's 1940 novella The Roads Must Roll. See also the slidewalk from Fritz Lieber's 1941 Sanity, the beltway from The Faceless Men (1948) by Leo Zagat and the moving roadway from H.G. Wells' 1899 story When the Sleeper Wakes.
However, the earliest reference to this idea is probably the street slides from Mrs. Maberly: Or, The World as it Will be (1836) by an Anonymous Author.
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
