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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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| Mental Static Device | ||
| Cloak the minds of individuals with a kind of 'noise'. |
| "...I could, with Semic’s help, construct what I shall describe as a Mental Static device. It is not beyond the ability of modern science to create an energy source that will duplicate an encephalograph-type pattern of electromagnetic field. Moreover, it can be made to shift at complete random, creating, as far as this particular mind-sense is concerned, a sort of ‘noise’ or ‘static’ which masks other minds with which it may be in contact. “Do you still follow?” Semic chuckled. He had helped create blindly, but he had guessed, and guessed correctly. The old man had a trick or two left— Anthor said : “I think I do.” “The device,” continued Darell, “is a fairly easy one to produce, and I had all the resources of the Foundation under my control as it came under the heading of war research. And now the mayor’s offices and the Legislative assemblies are surrounded with Mental Static. So are most of our key factories. So is this building. Eventually, any place we wish can be made absolutely safe from the Second Foundation or from any future Mule. |
| Technovelgy from Second Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1953 Additional resources -
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
