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"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
- William Gibson

Versificator  
  A device that composes words to music.  

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the distance, a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Technovelgy from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four), by George Orwell.
Published by Secker & Warburg in 1948
Additional resources -

Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the novel-writing machine from 1984 (1948) by George Orwell, the rhetorizer from The Penultimate Truth (1964) by Philip K. Dick and the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars (1971) by JG Ballard.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
  More Ideas and Technology by George Orwell
  Tech news articles related to 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
  Tech news articles related to works by George Orwell

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