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"I can't tell whether or not there's going to be a Singularity. I don't really believe the rapture of the nerds stereotype..."
- Charles Stross
 |
| Metal Insects | ||
| Small autonomous flying winged robots. |
| Rohan had brought back a handful of the "metal insects" in his pocket. Nearly twenty-four hours had been spent examining the little "flies." ...The strictly symmetrical tripartite structures resembled the letter "Y." Three wings were anchored in a central thickening, each wing tapering to a point in its extremity. They looked coal black under direct illumination; but reflected light made them glisten bluish and olive green, not unlike the abdomens of certain terrestrial which are composed of tiny surfaces like the multifaceted rose cut of a diamond... These miniscule elements, one one-hundredth the size of a small grain of sand, formed an autonomous nervous system with a number of independent fibers. |
| Technovelgy from The Invincible,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Poland in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the metallic spider from The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells, the scarab robot from The Scarab (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the spider robot from The Mystery of Element 117 (1949) by Milton K. Smith, the mechanical hound from Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury, the Sheem spider robot from The Witches of Karres (1966) by James Schmitz, the spider tripod from Rendezvous With Rama (1972) by Arthur C. Clarke, the spider cable device from The Web Between the Worlds (1979) by Charles Sheffield, the spider robotic insects from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton and the recon spiders from Minority Report (Movie) (2002) by Steven Spielberg.
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| Robots Repair And Modify Themselves |
| Robot Janitors Get To Work |
| Robots Learn To Install Charged Batteries Into Themselves |
| Robot Rabbits Entice Pythons |
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'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
'Living protoplasm incorporated into the Ampek F-a2 recording system...'
'Twoflower's Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs...'
'He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over the plains...'
'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
