Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
 |
| Vulcan 3 | ||
| Artificially intelligent self-modifying supercomputer. |
In the near-future Earth of the novel, Vulcan 3 is the final authority for the people of the world.
| Ahead of him, lights switched on. Behind him, enormous reinforced doors slid shut to fill in the chamber's single entrance. The huge calculator rose in front of him, the immense tower of receptor banks and indicators. He was alone with it - alone with Vulcan 3.
Very little of the computer was visible; its bulk disappeared into regions which he had never seen, which in fact no human had ever seen... Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface, to be carted off, and the variety, amount, and nature of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested. The financial cost of supporting Vulcan 3 was immense... At the latest estimate, Vulcan 3's share of the the taxes came to about forty-three percent. Beneath his feet the floor vibrated... What lay down there? Energy, tubes and pipes, wiring, transformers, self-contained machinery... He had a mental image of relentless activity... worn-out parts replaced, new parts invented; superior designs replaced obsolete designs. And how far had it spread? Miles? Vulcan 3 was aware of him. Across the vast impersonal face of metal an acknowledgment gleamed, a ribbon of fluid letters that appeared briefly and then vanished. |
| From Vulcan's Hammer,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Ace Books in 1960 Additional resources -
|
Vulcan 3 was named after the image created by its glowing power lines:
Director Jason Dill explained the rationale behind the construction of Vulcan 3:
...There was one answer. For years we had been using computers, giant constructs put together by the labor and talent of hundreds of trained experts, built to exact standards. Machines were free of the poisoning bias of self-interest and feeling that gnawed at man; they were capable of performing the objective calculations that for man would remain only an ideal, never a reality."
The games Machine from AE van Vogt's World of Null-A is a clear predecessor to the Vulcan 3 computer. Enjoy comparing Vulcan 3 to other computers large enough to run whole planets or societies: see the City Fathers from James Blish's Cities in Flight, Watchdog from Jack Haldeman's story of the same name, and Deep Thought from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
See also the way computers design computers in Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story The Feeling of Power.
The oldest reference I know about is the Government Machine from Mechanocracy (1932) by Miles J. Breuer.
...Power lines glowed red - the origin of the series name. The rumblings and dull flashes of red had reminded Nathaniel Greenstreet of the ancient god's forge, the lame god who had created the thunderbolts for Jupiter, in an age long past.
"But who would watch the Guardians? How could we be sure this supranational body would be free of the hate and bias, the animal passions that had set man against man throughout the centuries?
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Vulcan's Hammer
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to Vulcan's Hammer
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Vulcan 3-related
news articles:
- Robot Brain Grows As It Learns
- FAST Program AIs Search For Human 'Malintent'
- Google Engineers Not Sure What Google RankBrain AI Is Doing
| Venezuelans Teaching Your Self-Driving Car |
| Pun Generation Via Neural Nets |
| Can We Comprehend Deep Learning Systems? |
| Datagrid Model Generation Perfect For Eternal Cities Of Science Fiction |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'The planes flew continuously, twenty-four hours a day...'
'It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.'
'...a single perfectly level platform, which rose so high above the water that it was not splashed by the waves.'
'Is an extra-factual memory that convincing?' Quail asked.
Megastructures have repair robots, which have repair robots, ad infinitum.
‘She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew...’
Perfect for clot-busting in the human brain. No Raquel Welch and no lasers, though.
