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"[Science fiction is] nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible."
- Gregory Benford
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| Personal Interest Profile (PIP) | ||
| A set of topics about which you would like to hear the latest news; known today as Google News Alerts. |
The principal engineer in charge of the space elevator project liked to keep up on the relevant news on his area of interest; so, he set up his Personal Interest Profile to make sure that his computer searched for what he needed in the flood of global news items.
| But the same technology that had eliminated one set of tasks had created even more demanding successors. Of these, perhaps the most important was the design of the Personal Interest Profile.
Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day, or their birthday. Morgan's list contained fifty items; he had heard of people with hundreds. They must spend all their waking hours battling with the flood of information, unless they
were like those notorious pranksters who enjoyed setting up News Alerts on their consoles for such classic improbabilities as:
Eggs, Dinosaur, hatching of
Usually, of course, egotism and professional requirements ensured that the subscriber's own name was the first item on every list. Morgan was no exception, but the entries that followed were slightly unusual: These names covered most of the variations used by the media, and ensured that he saw at least ninety percent of the news items concerning the project. The vast majority of these were trivial, and sometimes he wondered if it was worth searching for them - the ones that really mattered would reach him quickly enough. |
| Technovelgy from The Fountains of Paradise,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Ballantine in 1978 Additional resources -
|
Today's reader will doubtless recognize the PIP as nothing less than the Google News Alert service. The Google Alerts were first beta'd in August of 2003. Just a quarter of a century after Clarke published the idea.
Compare this idea with the very similar interests profile from Frederik Pohl's 1966 novel The Age of the Pussyfoot. Also, see the personalized news from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911), by Hugo Gernsback, which had the idea of a newspaper printed based on general subscriber interests.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Fountains of Paradise
More Ideas
and Technology by Arthur C. Clarke
Tech news articles related to The Fountains of Paradise
Tech news articles related to works by Arthur C. Clarke
Personal Interest Profile (PIP)-related
news articles:
- Yotify Scouts Work The Web For You
- Wavii Follows Your Selected News
- Should You Put Your Virtual Assistants In Your Will?
| 'Facetime Facelift' Beautifies Video Chats |
| Meeting Wendy Of Wendy's |
| Narrative Science And Phil Dick's Homeostatic Newspaper |
| BookTrack Adds Sound To Books |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.'
'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
'... he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot.'
