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"[Science fiction is] nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible."
- Gregory Benford

Automatonic Autosuggestive Subvibratory Superaccelerator  
  Time goes in a circle.  

So you put this dingbat on and you say what you're going to do, and then you blur and then it is done. Not necessarily in that order...


(Dingbat from 'The Yehudi Principle' (1944) by Frederic Brown)

Charlie Swann blinked several times and seemed to be having trouble bringing his eyes into focus on me. He asked, “The real purpose of what?”
I enunciated slowly and carefully. “Of the automatonic autosuggestive subvibratory superaccelerator. Yehudi, to me.”
"Oh, that,” said Charlie.
“That,” I said. “What is its real purpose?”
“It’s like this. Suppose you got something to do that you’ve got to do in a hurry. Or something that you’ve got to do, and don't want to do. You could — ”
“Like writing a story?” I asked.
“Like writing a story,” he said, “or painting a bouse, or washing a mess of dishes, or shoveling the sidewalk, or . . . or doing anything else you’ve got to do but don’t want to do. Look, you put it on and tell yourself — ”
“Yehudi,” I said.
“Tell Yehudi to do it, and it’s done. Sure, you do it, but you don’t know that you do, so it doesn’t hurt. And it gets done quicker.”
“You blur,” I said.

Technovelgy from The Yehudi Principle, by Frederic Brown.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1944
Additional resources -

Thanks to SFFAudio for pointing out this story.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Yehudi Principle
  More Ideas and Technology by Frederic Brown
  Tech news articles related to The Yehudi Principle
  Tech news articles related to works by Frederic Brown

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