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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Eager Beaver | ||
| Your friendly robot helper. |
The Eager Beaver is a specialist; it works in a hospital and has additional subroutines to assist hospital staff. However, when it fails to understand a command, it proffers a card with the following information.
| IMPORTANT NOTICE! This service automaton does not understand human speech. It has no
understanding at all, being merely a machine. But for your convenience it has been designed to
respond to a list of spoken orders. It will ignore anything else said in its presence, or (if any phrase triggers it incompletely or such that a circuit dilemma is created) it will offer this instruction sheet. |
| Technovelgy from The Door Into Summer,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1956 Additional resources -
|
To me, this provides evidence of real engineering effort and thought. This is not magically waving a wand and making a perfect robot with perfectly human understanding. This is a device; it has limits and states them clearly for the user.
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'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
