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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Robots Learn With Cameras | ||
| Robots learn new actions by recording them with a camera, doing away with expensive programming. |
In the story, robots were multi-purpose, but had to be programmed to do particular work. That was the job of men like On-Punch-Card O'Brien - the greatest Instigator on Robot Row.
| “This Instigator’s business is silly,’’ said the [Dit-Dot] Kid. “Figure it yourself. You buy a robot and take it home. It’s got to do jobs around the house; it’s got to go out and get a job of work to pay for itself. So you have to hire an Instigator to cut input cards to make the robot go through the right motions. You need a hundred and fifty to two hundred input cards, at three dollars the card. You can’t machine-cut those input cards, because distances and heights are different in every home in the land and in every office where your robot goes to work.
“But suppose your robot gets fired, or you move to a new house? You have to go back and pay an Instigator all over again to cut new input cards to run the robot. Another six hundred bucks. No wonder the robot economy breaks so many people." “The way you can go broke is what makes robot-owning fun,” said Marie. He gave her one of those looks of disgust. “We’ve got a sick robot economy,” he chided her; “my invention helps cure that. You attach my camera to your robot. It takes 3-D pictures of the act you want it to perform. Only instead of film, it prints right here on this magnetic drum. Binary-coded information. You can run the robot right off the digital information on the drum. When your robot needs to learn a new set of movements, you simply re-record. The camera costs maybe a thousand dollars and lasts the life of the robot — ” “Wonderful!” breathed Marie. “Clever." She patted his hand. |
| Technovelgy from The Instigators,
by Raymond E. Banks. Published by Science Fiction Stories in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Will there ever be another way to program robots, other than by instruction sets created by human beings?
“Maybe.”
“Listen, jerk. Today I cut the Little One for you, understand? I don’t want to ever have to cut that Big One.”
The Kid stood up, brushing his hand-punch confetti off his lap. “You can’t stop progress,” he said.
One-Punch-Card got red. “Lemme tell you an important thing. Kid. The Instigator's Guild won’t ever allow another system of Instigating the robots. They’ll cut the Big One for anybody that comes too close. Don’t you know that?”
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
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'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
