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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
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| Blue Collar Robot (Self-Repairing) | ||
| An autonomous robot required to find its own work. |
In this future, autonomous robots need to find work; how else can you afford spare parts, not to mention upgrades?
| Jon Venex fitted the key into the hotel room door. He had asked for a large room, the largest in the hotel and had paid the desk clerk extra for it... The room was bigger than he expected - fully three feet wide by five feet long...
There was the usual adjustable hook on the back wall. He slipped it through the recessed ring in the back of his neck and kicked himself up until his feet hung free of the floor. His legs relaxed with a rattle as he cut off all power below his waist. The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it, plenty of time to skim through the newspaper. With the chronic worry of the unemployed, he snapped it open to the want ads and ran his eye down the Help Wanted - Robot column... |
| Technovelgy from The Velvet Glove,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Fantastic Universe in 1956 Additional resources -
|
This newspaper knew its readers; there were even comics for robots:
Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe,
Self-Maintaining Circuit Monitoring and Repair from Gramp and his Dog (1952) by Frank Quattrocchi, the
self-repairing robot from Accidental Flight (1952) by W.F. Wallace, the
service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan and the repair drone from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
He even had a favorite strip, a fact that he scarcely dared mention to himself - "Rattly Robot," a dull-witted mechanical clod who was continually falling all over himself and getting into trouble. It was a repellant caricature, but could still be very funny.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Velvet Glove
More Ideas
and Technology by Harry Harrison
Tech news articles related to The Velvet Glove
Tech news articles related to works by Harry Harrison
Blue Collar Robot (Self-Repairing)-related
news articles:
- Out-Of-Work Blue Collar Robots Need Your Help
- Blue Collar Bot Pumps Gas Update
- Unemployed Robots Should Seek Work Autonomously
- Pi4-Workerbot Adapts Quickly
- Competing With Blue Collar Robots
| Robot Gas Station Attendant Pumps Gas For You |
| SnapBot Robots - You Choose Their Legs And They Choose Their Gaits |
| Humanoid Robots Building Humanoid Robots |
| What's The Best Way To Ship And Unpack Humanoid Robots? |
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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.'
