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"Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over."
- William Gibson
 |
| Emissarial Projection | ||
| An expert system able to converse and act in the capacity of ambassador. |
| "Do you know what an emissarial projection is...? It's when they send a tuned suite of queries and responses to a remote location, by light beam. To play the part of an emissary."
"...If we are to believe what we are told, the object they send is something like a library, transmitted by a signal laser. Suitably housed and emplaced within enabled equipment of sufficient capacity and complexity, this... entity, though it is simply a many-branched array of statements, questions and answers, with a set of rules governing the order in which they are expressed, is able to carry out what seems like an intelligent conversation. It is as close as one is allowed to to come to an artificial intelligence. |
| Technovelgy from The Algebraist,
by Iain M Banks. Published by Orbit in 2004 Additional resources -
|
A much simpler use of this idea was used in the film I, Robot; Dr. Lanning creates a hologram controlled by simple rules to act as his representative after his death.
(Dr. Lanning hologram from I, Robot)
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
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'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
