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"In 1970 I found little difficulty staying 30 years ahead of the man in the street, and now I find it difficult to stay 18 months ahead of the man on the street."
- Vernor Vinge
 |
| Raisin | ||
| A small device like a hearing aid that fits inside the external part of the ear; combines an intelligent agent and wireless access to the network. |
John uses the "raisin" not just to be his helper, his intelligent agent in completing tasks on the network. He also uses it as his mentor; he relies on it for advice.
| The Jism [JSM] he spoke to was as much in the windshield or dashboard as it was in the small brown "raisin" he wore just inside his left ear.
Jism was the name John used for the nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Sometimes a Jism image would flash on the windshield. John could glimpse the thin Englishman in his frock coat and see his bald forehead and blue eyes and thick dark sideburns. The tera-flop image still was not perfect on the windshield. And John did not like to think of Jism sitting apart from him or dangling above the Jeep on the highway. John liked to think of Jism as in the raisin. Then Jism lived with John in John's mind. The raisin talked to John and he could still talk to it when he left his Jeep or his desert home. The voice of Jism was always with him. John kept extra raisins in his pocket and wallet and in his desert trailer... John did not know if they had tried to decrypt his raisin. He could only hope that if they did then they would trip the raisin's self-destruct routines. |
| Technovelgy from Nanotime,
by Bart Kosko. Published by Avon Books in 1987 Additional resources -
|
The technology of hearing aids has come a long way since the versions of the 1960's that were the size of a portable cd player; see Digital Hearing Aids - the Way of the Future for more information on the receiving part of a "raisin."
John had trained his raisin using the works of John Stuart Mill. Apparently, the raisin is intelligent on its own, not just in contact with the network.
A sample quote from JS Mill:
"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained."
An interesting analogue to this idea is the "Green Bullet" from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953.
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