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"It is change ... that is the dominant factor in society today... the world as it will be. This means that ... every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.""
- Isaac Asimov
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| Robot Manifesto | ||
| A linotype machine demands its rights. |
A Linotype machine (used to set type for printing) has received an unusual upgrade; it has started to absorb the words it typesets.
| "It's Saturday," he told me, "and it's gone on a
five-day, forty-hour week. I made the mistake of
setting type yesterday for a book on Socialism and
labor relations, and... well, apparently... you
see" He reached into the top drawer of his desk. "Anyway, here's a galley proof of the manifesto it issued this morning, demanding its rights..." And as he did these mechanical duties George told me, it came to him fully that the Linotype no longer worked for him; he was working for the Linotype. Why it wanted to set type he didn't know and it didn't seem to matter. After all, that was what it was for, and probably it was instinctive. Or, as I suggested and he agreed was possible, it was interested in learning. And it read and assimilated by the process of typesetting. Vide: the effect in terms of direct action of its reading the Socialist books. |
| Technovelgy from ETAOIN SHRDLU,
by Frederic Brown. Published by Unknown Worlds in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the robot strike from Robots of the World! Arise! (1952) by Mari Wolf, the general strike of the robots from Rex (1934) by Harl Vincent, and the "metallic Marx" from The Robots Strike (1959) by Harry Harrison.
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| A Remarkable Coincidence |
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
