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"I think engineering will supply our demand for a "spiritual" life after meat death."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Human Habit Pattern Machines | ||
| Imposing human habits onto machines. |
| ...each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn't hurt the man and it didn't make the machine into a monster. |
| Technovelgy from The Tunnel Under The World,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
Or did it?
Compare to the neuristor brain from My Name os Legion (1976) by Roger Zelazny and the artificial brain from Edmond Hamilton's 1926 classic The Metal Giants.
Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.
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'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
