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"But the problem with reincarnation is that it's hard to imagine what the storage medium for past lives would be. Not to mention the input-output device. I hesitate to rule it out completely, but I'd need pretty definite proof."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Brood Assembly | ||
| Artificially intelligent computers that can replicate themselves. |
What can you do when your city needs artificially intelligent computers to guide it?
| He [Mayor Amalfi] was saying to Frad: "The arrangements with the machinery are cumbersome, but not difficult in principle. We can lend you our Brood assembly until she replicates herself; then you reset the daughter machine, feed her scrap and out come City Fathers to the number that you'll need - probably about a third as many as we carry, and it'll take maybe ten years. You can use the time feeding them data, because in the beginning they'll be idiots except for the computation function. |
| Technovelgy from Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Readers will recognize the idea of self-reproducing automata, which John von Neumann wrote about in 1948 in a lecture called "General and Logical Theory of Automata".
You can read an even earlier treatment of the idea in the 1941 short story The Mechanical Mice, by Eric Frank Russell (writing as Maurice A. Hugi). See the entry for robot mother.
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"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
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