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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Automated City | ||
| A fully automated, complete town. |
As far as I know, the first instance of the idea of a fully mechanized city.
| I cannot describe the city. No human mind can even dream of the magnificence, the lavishness, the comfort, or the cleanliness of such a spot. Indeed, I did not understand the necessity for such cleanliness, as I saw not a single living creature. No people, no animals. Not a single dog crossing the street, not a single swallow in the sky.
I saw a splendid building whose sign read “Hotel,” just like that, written as we write it ourselves, and I went in. It was entirely deserted. I went to the dining room. There was an extremely substantial dinner available there... After having eaten I went out into the street. Trams and cars drove past, all of them entirely empty. All one had to do was approach and wave one’s hand and they would stop. I got into a car and allowed myself to be carried through the streets. I went to a magnificent geological park, with all the different types of land displayed with explanations on cards at their side. The explanation was given in Spanish, but written in a phonetic transcription. I left the park; I saw a tram passing with “Museum” on its front, and I took it. All the most famous paintings were in the museum, in their original versions. I became convinced that all the paintings we have in our cities, in our art galleries, are nothing more than extremely competent copies. At the foot of each painting there was a learned explanation of its historical and aesthetic value, written most calmly and carefully. In half an hour there, I learned more about painting than in twelve years of study here. I saw on a placard at the entrance that in Mechanopolis the Art Museum is considered a part of the Museum of Paleontology. It existed in order to study the products of the human race that had lived on this earth before the machines had supplanted them. The concert hall and the libraries, with which the city was filled, were also a part of the paleontological culture of the citizens of Mechanopolis, whoever they had been. What more did I see? I went to the chief concert hall, where the instruments played by themselves. I was in the Grand Theater. In a cinema with phonographic accompaniment, designed in such a way as to give an absolute illusion of life. But my soul shrank to think that I was the only spectator. Where were the citizens of Mechanopolis?
When I woke up the next morning in my hotel room I found, on my bedside table, the Mechanopolis Echo, with news stories from all over the world received via wireless telegraph. And on the last page I read the following: “Yesterday afternoon, by what means we are uncertain, there arrived in our city a man, one of the few poor fellows still left around here, and we predict he will have a rough time of it.”
I rushed out like a madman and threw myself in front of the first electric tram that passed by. When I awoke from the blow I found myself once again in the oasis I had left behind. I started walking and came across the tent of some Bedouin, and when I met one of them, I embraced him in tears. How well we understood one another even without words! They gave me food, they cared for me, and at night I went out with them and, stretched out on the ground, looking up at the stars, we prayed together. There was not a single machine to be found nearby. And ever since then I have developed a true hatred of what we choose to call progress, and even of culture itself, and I look everywhere for someone who is like me, a man like me, who laughs and cries just as I cry and laugh, and a place where there are no machines and where the days flow by with the same sweet Christian meekness as an undiscovered river flows through the virgin forest. |
| Technovelgy from Mechanopolis,
by Miguel de Unamuno. Published by Not Known in 1913 Additional resources -
|
Here's another example of this idea, from Paradise and Iron (1930) by Miles J. Breuer:
Compare to the automatic city from The Man in the Maze (1969) by Robert Silverberg.
"...Your world is far
ahead of us along general lines. We have no heavier-than-air flying, no submarines, no television - things
that have become so common in your life. But, in our
one line, we have progressed so far ahead of you that
you will gasp when it dawns upon you. And you will
shiver in horror when you realize what it has brought
upon us."
"Must be some kind of a nightmare," I agreed.
"Tell me the worst. Who runs the city?-and all that machinery!"
"Nobody! It runs itself!"
"You mean it's all automatic?" I was dizzy again with astonishment.
"That does not really express the state of affairs
at all," Kaspar said. "I must explain from the beginning. That terrible city there is an example of what
happens when the ability of a long line of inventive
and scientific ancestors is concentrated in one individual, who is myself.
"It all started in a very modest way of mine, to
develop a car that could automatically refill itself with
gasoline, water, oil, and air, when its supply of these things fell below a certain minimum-"
"To eat when it got hungry, so to speak?" I laughed.
The thing was getting hold of my nerves again.
"Good comparison. Everything was favorable to me.
I owned half a county in east Texas where oil was
found, and became one of the richest men in the world.
I wanted to experiment with automatic cars without
being bothered, and I bought this island; and here I
brought the best engineers and scientific men in
America. I paid them royally -"
Our next steр
was automatic steering, so that the machine could
avoid obstacles in the road without attention from a
driver at a steering-wheel."
"I don't understand how these machines can drive
automatically," I interrupted, very much puzzled, "unless they can see?"
"They can see!" He pointed to an excrescence on
each headlight of the machine, like a bud on a potato.
"That's the selenium eye," Kaspar explained. "The
electrical resistance of the metal selenium varies with
the intensity of the light that strikes it; and that is
a little camera chamber with a lens and a selenium
network. By its means, the machine can see."
"The earlier machines had steering-wheels; their
vision was a simple reflex for avoiding obstacles, while
the driver had to choose the route himself. But, in
a number of years we developed the logging attachment to the speedometer, by means of which it is possible to lay out the route on a set of dials. The machine could then find its way without human aid."
I started down at the complex, iron thing, trying
to imagine that it once had been alive and now was
dead.
"Then," Kaspar continued, "just as I had first
equipped the machines with the mechanical equivalent
of hunger, that is, a sensitiveness to a diminished reserve of fuel, lubricant, etc., so now we soon equipped
them with the mechanical equivalent of pain, or in
other words, a sensitiveness to damage or disorder. When a machine got out of order, or a certain amount
of wear and tear had taken place, it automatically
proceeded to a repair station. At first, repair stations
were in charge of skilled men; but the automatic tradition had so thoroughly permeated all my people that
very shortly repairs were all automatic. The principle was applied to all máchinery, stationary as well as
mobile. From that, it wasn't a far step to the automatic building of new machines mechanical reproduction.
"Our machines are endowed with senses: sight, hearing, touch. Hearing was a simple matter of microphones. Smell was a simple chemical problem, but not
of much practical value. We even gave them senses
which human beings do not have, the ability to perceive various vibrations and forms of energy in the
ether of space. They could do everything but reason.
"I wish we had stopped there. Then we would be
as happy today as we were in those golden days when
we had no cares nor troubles, and were free to pursue
research in scientific and mechanical fields. But, an
insatiable thirst for progress drove us inexorably
onward..."
"However, what I started to make clear to you a moment ago is that the entire city is in reality one vast
and unified organism. It is controlled by a single brain,
whose capabilities are as far ahead of those of the little
individual brains as its size exceeds theirs.
"That brain is the mass of apparatus you found in
the small, ornate building where the lenses stared at
you. I was in that room several years ago, and at that
time suspected that it was the brain of the city. It is
all a vast electrical nervous system, whose peripheral
fibers run all over the city; whose sensory end-organs
are lenses and microphones everywhere; whose motor
end-organs are all the countless machines controlled by
the different wires, while this central mass of reflex
and association apparatus comprises the brain and
spinal cord. I could trace out some of the steps of
this system in its earlier stages.
"The whole city is one living monster, with its individual parts running about just as leucocytes run about
freely in our own bodies, going where they are needed
to perform their functions. That is what our community
of frail, pampered human beings, have to contend
against!
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'Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype. A mimetic poly-alloy. Liquid metal.'
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