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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Maintenance Drone (Holon) | ||
| A semi-autonomous flying device used to perform repairs. |
| THE TIBETAN MAINTENANCE DRONES had the sleek bodies of dragonflies. Their surfaces scattered the sunlight back in violet and emerald. Slender legs protruded from their thoraxes on trochanter and coxa sockets, ending in grasping claws. They moved with darting grace from one task to another in the temple courtyard...
The automonk that was missing an arm—one of the two that had spoken with Ha the night before—wandered the courtyard in a wobbling meditative circle. Its saffron robe was torn in several places... Evrim came up the path carrying the missing limb and laid it on one of the votive tables. “I found it in the cleft of a banyan tree.” The second dragonfly drone hummed over, darting around the limb in small circles... “They are not drones,” Altantsetseg said. “Though I suppose most people still call them that, the same way for decades people called our terminals ‘phones.’ These are sophisticated hybrid systems... The dragonfly had descended from its transport unit and landed on the damaged automonk. It was now using a scissor tool to cut away the torn saffron robes... “The holon is an innovation of their own. And yes—as Evrim said, it has helped make them very rich. The term means a self-reliant unit with enough independence built into it to handle contingencies without asking a central control authority for instructions—but it is simultaneously subject to control from its higher authority. You can’t tell where your command ends and the response algorithm begins. It’s like an extension of the nervous system, but more than that: information in the system flows bi-directionally. It’s as if your limbs talked back—as if your limbs were little minds that innovate and improvise. |
| Technovelgy from The Mountain in the Sea,
by Ray Naylor. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, the hammers from Vulcan's Hammer (1960) by Philip K. Dick,automated apartment maintenance from Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick, the Powered Suit with Trauma Maintenance from The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman, the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan, the Christmas Bush Motile Robot from Rocheworld (1985) by Robert Forward and the maritime robots from Mare Nostrum (2022) by Bruce Sterling.
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'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
