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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Mnemonic Service | ||
| Dedicated humans who collected bits of data in hopes of catching key correlations between fields of study. |
| Sheffield said, "Somewhere inside the human brain is a record of every datum that has impinged upon it. Very little of it is consciously remembered, but all of it is there, and a small association can bring an individual datum back without a person's knowing where it comes from. So you get a 'hunch' or a 'feeling.' Some people are better at it than others. And some can be trained. Some are almost perfect, like Mark Annuncio and a hundred like him. Some day, I hope, there'll be a billion like him, and we'll really have a Mnemonic Service. "All their lives," Sheffield went on, "they do nothing but read, look, and listen. And train to do that better and more efficiently. It doesn't matter what data they collect. It doesn't have to have obvious sense or obvious significance. It doesn't matter if any man in the Service wants to spend a week going over the records of the space-polo teams of the Canopus Sector for the last century. Any datum may be useful some day. That's the fundamental axiom. "Every once in a while, one of the Service may correlate across a gap no machine could possibly manage. The machine would fail because no one machine is likely to possess those two pieces of thoroughly unconnected information; or else, if the machine does have it, no man would be insane enough to ask the right question. One good correlation out of the Service can pay for all the money appropriated for it in ten years or more." |
| Technovelgy from Sucker Bait,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Thanks to Winchell Chung for suggesting this item.
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
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'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
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'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
