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"Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together."
- Ray Bradbury
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| Smart Dust | ||
| Very tiny computers. |
Lem imagines that computers can be no larger than tiny grains of sand; a desert becomes a massively parallel-processing computer system.
| "The desert on our planet is in reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 10^9 times more powerful than this primitive device of yours. Our ancestors created it for the simple reason that anything else would have been too easy for them; in their megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent..." |
| Technovelgy from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Harcourt Brace in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the ultraminiature spy circuit from The Unknown by Christoper Anvil and wildcode from The Fractal Prince (2012) by Hannu Rajaniemi.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age
More Ideas
and Technology by Stanislaw Lem
Tech news articles related to The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age
Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
Smart Dust-related
news articles:
- Millimeter-Scale Computing For 'Internet of Things'
- IBM's Grain Of Sand Computer
| Cortex 1 - Today A Warehouse, Tomorrow A Calculator Planet |
| Is Agentic AI The Wrong Kind Of Smartness? |
| Jetson Orin Nano Super 70 Just $249 |
| Automatic Bot Traffic Is 38 Percent Of HTTP Requests |
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'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype. A mimetic poly-alloy. Liquid metal.'
'It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting...'
'There were cubic miles of it, and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree...'
'Jason had been guiding the caravan of cars as usual...'
"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.'
