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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Robot Cab Driver | ||
| You think you have problems? Robots have the worst problems of anyone. |
In his short story A Present For Pat, Philip K. Dick tells the story of Eric Blake, who runs into all sorts of problems as a result of bringing a Ganymedean Weather Deity back from a trip to the moons of Jupiter.
On his way back from a bad day at the office, Eric asks his robot cab driver what it would do with the kind of problems that human beings have.
| "What would you do," Eric asked the robot cabdriver, "if your wife had turned to stone, your best friend were a toad, and you had lost your job?"
"Robots have no wives," the driver said. "They are nonsexual. Robots have no friends, either. They are incapable of emotional relationships." "Can robots be fired?" "Sometimes." The robot drew his cab up before Eric's modest six-room bungalow. "But consider. Robots are frequently melted down and new robots made from the remains. Recall Ibsen's Peer Gynt, the section concerning the Button Molder. The lines clearly anticipate in symbolic form the trauma of robots to come." "Yeah." The door opened and Eric got out. "I guess we all have our problems." "Robots have worse problems than anybody." The door shut and the cab zipped off, back down the hill. |
| Technovelgy from A Present for Pat,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Startling Stories in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Classic Dick. This is a great short story collection.
However, the idea of a robot driving a car is much older. Consider The Automatic Motorist by W.R. Booth.
Compare to the autocab from Between Planets (1951), by Robert Heinlein.
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Tech news articles related to A Present for Pat
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Robot Cab Driver-related
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- TeslaBot Uber Driver (2024) And The Automatic Motorist (1911)
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
