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"One can see the free software movement as a precusor for a "free hardware" or "free wetware" movement--one that will provide free libraries of designs for biological or nanotechnological products that replicators can be programmed to churn out."
- Charles Stross

Living Machines  
  Robots that are able to learn.  

An interesting early treatment of the distinction between automated machinery and mechanisms that are capable of learning.

"Man is not a machine in the purely mechanical sense, though many of his functions are demonstrably mechanical. The ability to reason, however it has evolved, whatever it may be at bottom, whether a bewildering complexity of reflex actions or not, lifts man above the dignity of — a machine. Does this imply the impossibility of creating machines (mechanical brains) that can profit by experience, go through the processes which we call thought? No; but it does imply that such machines (however created) are no longer mere mechanisms. There is here a dialectical process to be reckoned with. Machines that 'learn' are living machines."

Living machines ! I mouthed that phrase over and over to myself — and mouthing it I looked at the cylinders with increasing dread. They were machines.

Technovelgy from The Mentanicals, by Francis Flagg.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1934
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Science Fiction in the News

JAXA Int Ball 2 Coming Right Along As Star Wars Remote
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'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'

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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'

Some Ringworld Configurations Are Stable
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'

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Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'

SnapBot Robots - You Choose Their Legs And They Choose Their Gaits
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.

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'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'

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