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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Synthetic Intellect | ||
| A machine mind, created and improved by more primitive machine minds. |
I can’t think of an earlier reference to this idea.
| However, there were things there which did not belong in the pilot chamber of any ordinary vessel. Among them was a large, square case, from which many wires radiated. It contained the cool, synthetic intellect of MZ-1. Minds that could compare with it in keenness and power, existed only in the Place of Knowledge. MZ-1 was not like the worker and soldier robots whose simple reasoning faculties are adapted only to routine duties. MZ-1 was the first of its kind; it was a superthing, for in it were united the strength and mobility of the fastest space ship, and the mental powers of a thought machine.
The latter were marvelous fabrications now. Five hundred years ago a genius named Benz had invented the first. Its mental abilities had been about equal to those of a man, though its memory and its mathematical capacities were more accurate. Benz had made a score of the machines, and he had put them to the task of designing others. Improvements had been rapid. The first machines had swiftly become obsolete. Those they had invented had taken their place ; and these latter, in turn, invented sentient mechanisms which were a little ahead of themselves. So it had gone, stop by step, year after year, until the synthetic intellects at the Place of Knowledge had far outstripped the minds of men, and had reached a level of thought that was truly deific. It might have been said that Benz was the last human being really to think. After his time, all thought and all invention was mechanical. |
| Technovelgy from The Machine That Thought,
by William Callahan. Published by Science Fiction in 1939 Additional resources -
|
Compare to computers improve computers from The Feeling of Power (1958) by Isaac Asimov and Vulcan 3 from Vulcan's Hammer (1960) by Philip K. Dick.
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Tech news articles related to The Machine That Thought
Tech news articles related to works by William Callahan
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- Virtual Rat Predicts Actual Rat Neural Activity
| Rogue AI Replicated Itself |
| When AI Takes Its First Breath |
| Japan's AI Buddharoid Automonks |
| Lawyer AIs Create Chaos In Our Legal System |
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'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
