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"I love that computer science has made mathematics into something like an experimental science. I was never all that good at proving things, but I love doing computer experiments."
- Rudy Rucker
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| Smartcab | ||
| An automated taxicab, fully self-driving, that can be summoned from a portable device. |
Very early description of something like an Uber, where you use your pocket-sized device to bring a taxicab straight to your location.
| Rayno ordered up a smartcab and we piled out of Buddy's. No more riding the transys for us, we were going in style! We charged the smartcab off to some law company and cruised all over Eastside.
Riding the boulevards got stale after awhile, so we rerouted to the library. We do a lot of our fun at the library, 'cause nobody ever bothers us there. Nobody ever goes there. We sent the smartcab, still on the law company account, off to Westside. |
| Technovelgy from Cyberpunk!,
by Bruce Bethke. Published by Amazing Stories in 1983 Additional resources -
|
Here's another excerpt about smartcabs:
We got a smartcab outside the library and went off to someplace Lisa picked for lunch. Georgie got this idea about garbaging up the smartcab's brain so that the next customer would have a real state fair ride, but Rayno wouldn't let him do it. Rayno didn't talk to him during lunch, either.
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Tech news articles related to works by Bruce Bethke
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'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
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Accompanied by a small selection of similar ideas from science fiction.
'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
