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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
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| Robot Tracking Device | ||
| Small UAV robot remotely operated by an artificially intelligent computer. |
Vulcan 3, an underground self-modifying supercomputer, uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to find out what's going on with the humans.
| On the chest of drawers something was perched. Something that gleamed, shiny metal, gleamed and clicked as it turned toward her. She saw into two glassy mechanical lenses, something with a tubelike body, the size of a child's bat, shot upward and swept toward her. |
| Technovelgy from Vulcan's Hammer,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Ace Books in 1960 Additional resources -
|
Take a look at what artists in 1960 thought a robot tracking device looked like in this first edition cover photo:
The same device attacked the leader of the resistance movement:
"...I found most of it." He triumphantly displayed a charred but still intact metal cylinder with an elaborate system of antennas, receptors and propulsion jets.
Here's what it feels like to live in this future society:
Madness, he thought. The ultimate horror for our paranoid culture; vicious unseen mechanical entities that flit at the edges of our vision, that can go anywhere, that are in our very midst. And there may be an unlimited number of them. One of them following each of us...
The existence of these devices is one demonstration of Vulcan 3's paranoia; ordinarily, it relied on countless human beings who provided it with information. Dick compares the provision of data to Vulcan 3 with slopping a hog - he refers to "data troughs."
Compare to the scuttle-bot from Hella (2020) by David Gerrold and the robot snake spy from Mariposa (2009) by Greg Bear.
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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
Robot Tracking Device-related
news articles:
- Draganflyer X6 Helicopter Has HD Camera
- Aggressive Autonomous Quadrotor UAV Makes Its Moves
- Perching Flying Robot
- Wasp Micro-UAV Used By Texas SWAT
- Rolling Robot's Helicopter Transformation
- sFly UAVs Swarm Together For SAR
- EASE Surveillance Robot Hovering Near You
- Google's Project Wing Will Find You
- Flying Robot Has An Arm
- Prodrone Dual Arm Drone PD6B-AW-ARM As Predicted In 1960
- DoD Requests AI Drone Swarm
- 'Alexa For Residential' A Landlord's Dream (Tenant's Nightmare?)
- In Your Orchard, Do You Want Buzzing Suction Drones, OR Dick's Claw Hand Drones?
| Chameleon Personalized Privacy Protection Mask |
| Spherical Police Robot Rolls In China |
| Vietnam To Have Full Biometric Transparency |
| Simple Way To Defeat AI Face Recognition |
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
