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"What has allowed so many Psychopathic Personalities to rise so high in corporations and government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Automatic Pilot | ||
| A device to control the movement of aircraft using computer components. |
Marketing is everything in this classic novel from the 1950's. Although Pohl certainly did not invent the automatic pilot, he is one of the first to use a non-mechanical method to make it work.
| A team of designers went to work on an automatic pilot. When it was done it worked pretty well. And weighed four and a half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope. |
| Technovelgy from The Space Merchants,
by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth). Published by St. Martin's Press in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Elmer A. Sperry built the first automatic pilot for aircraft using gyroscopes in 1910.
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
