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"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Surgical Homeostatic Unit | ||
| An autonomous surgical robot, able to drill into the body and perform surgery. |
Surgical 'robots' are just now under serious development; no fully autonomous robots are available, as yet - I think.
| From his case Eric lifted a small surgical homeostatic unit; it would suffice - he hoped - for the delicate operation. Drilling its own path, and closing the passage behind it, the tool would penetrate the dermal layer and then the omentum until it reached the renal stricture, whereupon, if it was behaving properly, it would begin construction of a plastic bypass for the arterial section; this would be safer, at the moment, than attempting to remove the ring.
Placing the homeostatic surgical tool against Molinari's lower right side, Eric activated it; the device, the size of a shot glass, at once flung itself into activity, delivering first a strong local anesthetic and then beginning its task of cutting its way to the renal artery and the kidney. The only sound in the room now was the whirring caused by the action of the tool; everyone, including Minister Freneksy, watched it disappear from sight, burrowing into Molinary's heavy, motionless body. |
| Technovelgy from Now Wait For Last Year,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Dick also wrote about the idea of robotic surgical tools in an earlier story; see the article on the robot surgeon-hand in his 1955 short story War Veteran.
Compare to the emergency treatment tank from Agent of Vega (1949) by James Schmitz, the
Gobathian from Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford Simak, the autodoc from The Warriors (1966) by Larry Niven, the diagnostat from The Man in the Maze (1969) by Robert Silverberg, electronic body analyzer from The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton, the crechepod from The Godmakers (1972) by Frank Herbert and the autosurgeon from Altered Carbon (2003) by Richard Morgan.
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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.'
