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"The immediate problem with our meat brains is that they have no back-up. We can lose the most precious information we have from one bump on the head or stroke. You want a mind system with back-up that can access other databases."
- Bart Kosko

Yardsticks  
  Smaller people take up less space.  

The Leff shots had created the new generation of Yardsticks, and they lived in their own world. Their shrunken, dehydrated world of dollhouses and miniatures. They’d deserted the old-fashioned skyscrapers and cut the big apartment buildings up into tiny cubicles; two could occupy the space formerly reserved for one.
That had been the purpose of the Leff shots in the first place — to put an end to overcrowding and conserve on resources...

“Any woman wants a baby, she’s got to have those shots. They say kids shrink down into nothing. Weigh less than two pounds when they’re born, and never grow up to be any bigger than midgets. … This man Leffingwell figures on cutting down on size so’s to keep the whole shebang going.”
“Along came this man Leffingwell, with his solution. That’s just what it is, of course—an endocrinological solution, for direct injection.”

It was even murder to ride public transportation because of the space-reductions. Eric drove his own jetter. Besides, that way was safer. Crowded into a line) with a gang of Yardsticks, with only a few other Naturalists around, there might be trouble.
Oh, it was getting to be a Yardstick world, and no mistake. Smaller furniture, smaller meals, smaller sizes in clothing, smaller buildings —

Technovelgy from This Crowded Earth, by Robert Bloch.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1958
Additional resources -

Compare to the great change from The Giant (1942) by Basil Wells.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from This Crowded Earth
  More Ideas and Technology by Robert Bloch
  Tech news articles related to This Crowded Earth
  Tech news articles related to works by Robert Bloch

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