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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
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In this book of novellas, Roger Zelazny shows us some of the life experience of a man who doesn't exist. That is, according to the computer systems of this near future world, he did not exist.
One of the original programmers, he was able to assign himself an identity whenever he wished. Each of the stories is a case he accepted as a contractor from a private investigative agency.
In this story, the Hangman is a remarkable device that was part telefactoring device and part autonomous robot. Using an advanced brain, it learned while being used as a telefactoring device. However, this robot learned more than anyone thought possible from his trainers, returning from a space mission to kill them one by one.
The above quote describes the experience of both seeing from the robot's point of view and one's own.
This novel explores, in a very thoughtful way, a very unexpected manner in which machine intelligence might arise. It's an interesting question: how much of the complexity of our own thinking and feeling do we want to pass on to machines?
In the story, the sensitive neuristor brain of the Hangman teleoperated robot is subjected to the impressions, thoughts and feelings of the operators when a night watchman is inadvertently killed by the robot during a test run out of the lab, and into a bank.
![]() (From 'Home is the Hangman' by Roger Zelazny) Compare to the control helmet from Dawn of the Demigods, by Raymond Z. Gallun, published by Planet Stories in 1954. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'THE red tennis robot scooted desperately across the court...'
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Lazy Lawyer's Trust In ChatGPT Misplaced
'The Law Society has strict rules on the use of pseudo-intelligent software...'
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