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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
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In the story, Dan Burman is a famed inventor of a variety of machines. However, his friend Bill discovers that, in fact, Burman has invented only one machine - a psychophone that allows him to visit a kind of future.
In this future era, human beings are clearly dominated by machines. Burman brings back the blueprints for an unusual invention, one whose function is not immediately obvious.
The machine does not sit still for long. It appears to have no starting handle of any kind; however, it soon initiates its own activity. In time, it sends out small mechanical mice, which are described as "golden shuttles", to obtain necessary materials.
After a number of skirmishes with the inventor, as well as the local police, the malevolent machine is destroyed. Or is it?
..."Did you notice," I went on, "the touch of bee-psychology in our antagonists? You built the hive, and from it emerged workers, warriors, and" - I indicated the dead saunterer - "one drone."
With a sigh of relief, I strolled toward the door. A high whine of midget motors drew my startled attention downward. While Butman and I stared aghast, a golden shuttle slid easily through one of the rat holes, sensed the death of the Robot Mother and scooted back through the other hole before I could stop it...
"Bill," [Burman] mouthed, "your bee analogy was perfect. Don't you understand? There's another swarm! A queen got loose!"
This is a very early use of the concept of a robot or system that is capable of reproducing itself perfectly. The first scientist to write about self-reproducing automata was John von Neumann, who delivered a lecture in 1948 called "General and Logical Theory of Automata" at a symposium in Pasadena, California. One of the questions he posed was whether or not it was possible for a machine to fabricate a copy of itself.
In the Mechanical Mice story, the author clearly sees the Robot Mother as constructing duplicates of itself using available parts (stealing them from watches). It appears that Maurice A. Huigi and Eric Frank Russell anticipated von Neumann's question by a handful of years.
It is possible that Russell got his idea the same place von Neumman apparently did, from the work of the English mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's theory of computing automata (published in 1936) introduced the notion of a "universal automaton" that was able to reproduce any programmed output of any possible automaton. However, Turing's ideas only covered computing output (1's and 0's); von Neumann was talking about automata the output of which was other automata. Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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