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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
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What brought this robot rebellion about?
"So wrote Bane Borgson, seventy years of age, fifteen years after his invention of the multiple mechanical-cell, and God help us ! we had not long to wait for the Mentanicals to supply an answer to his questions.
"I have told of the whispering of: my servants. That was a disquieting thing. But more disquieting still it was to hear that whispering coming over the radio, the telephone, to observe cylindrical Mentanicals listening, answering. Frankenstein must have felt as I felt in those days. During that period, which lasted several years, things went smoothly enough; to a great extent people became accustomed to the phenomenon and decided save for a few men and women here and there, like to myself that the whispering was an idiosyncrasy of the Mentanicals, implicit in their make-up, and that the various scientists and thinkers who wrote and talked with foreboding were theorists and alarmists of the extremest type. Indeed there were certain scientists and philosophers of reputation, who maintained them in this belief. Then came the first blow : The Mentanical servants ceased waiting on man!
To understand the terrible nature X of this defection, one must understand how dependant humanity had become on the Mentanicals, In those days human toilers were relatively few in number, laboring under the direction of the Mentanical superintendents and also guards (in the bloody wars of a decade before and the ones preceding them the ranks of labor had been woefully decimated) ; and it was estimated that the growth of the machine had lifted, and was still lifting, millions of workers into the leisure class. The dream of the Technocrats a group of pseudo-scientists and engineers who held forth in 1932-33seemed about to be fulfilled. "But when the Mentanicals struck, the whole fabric of this new system swayed, tottered. Food ceased coming into the cities, distribution of food supplies stopped. Not at first did starvation threaten. Men and women fetched food from the supply depots. But in a few weeks these depots were emptied of their contents. Then famine threatened, not alone in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, but in the great cities of Europe.
Compare to the robot revolt from The Exile of Time (1931) by Ray Cummings. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
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