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"It's also important to vary your stimuli. I always look for new things to shock the system. Just as you make muscles grow by shocking them, you make the mind grow by shocking it."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Robot Manifesto | ||
| A linotype machine demands its rights. |
A Linotype machine (used to set type for printing) has received an unusual upgrade; it has started to absorb the words it typesets.
| "It's Saturday," he told me, "and it's gone on a
five-day, forty-hour week. I made the mistake of
setting type yesterday for a book on Socialism and
labor relations, and... well, apparently... you
see" He reached into the top drawer of his desk. "Anyway, here's a galley proof of the manifesto it issued this morning, demanding its rights..." And as he did these mechanical duties George told me, it came to him fully that the Linotype no longer worked for him; he was working for the Linotype. Why it wanted to set type he didn't know and it didn't seem to matter. After all, that was what it was for, and probably it was instinctive. Or, as I suggested and he agreed was possible, it was interested in learning. And it read and assimilated by the process of typesetting. Vide: the effect in terms of direct action of its reading the Socialist books. |
| Technovelgy from ETAOIN SHRDLU,
by Frederic Brown. Published by Unknown Worlds in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the robot strike from Robots of the World! Arise! (1952) by Mari Wolf, the general strike of the robots from Rex (1934) by Harl Vincent, and the "metallic Marx" from The Robots Strike (1959) by Harry Harrison.
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'...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.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
