Another bit of
speculation from the days when John W. Campbell thought he was editing
Technology Today rather than a sci-fi magazine. I always
enjoyed the science fact articles in Analog. They were a
wonderful mixture of pretty good discussions of basic science mixed
with pure gonzo take-a-fact-and-run-with-it speculation. Show
Campbell a clockwork widget that hopped about on a string and he would
declare it a prototype "space drive." A box of electrical parts
that seemed to react when you thought at it and you had a machine that
would give man telepathy. A similar box backed up with some cod
Freudian psychobabble, or even just the psychobabble, and you had a
new science of the mind. Some basic facts about crystal growth,
as we see here, and you have a self-repairing robot. Like Hugo
Gernsback before him, Campbell
often gave the impression that once he'd come up with the idea the
hard part was over and it was all a matter of someone else working out
the details. I've had friends like that. "I know how to
handle Al Qaeda: establish world peace." "Good idea. How
do we do that?" "Oh, don't bother me with the fiddly bits."
But
Campbell wasn't the only one interested in self-repairing robots.
In 1959, Clifford D. Simak took it a step further in his short story
Installment Plan, wherein robots learned to reproduce by
assembling more of themselves from spare parts. Say what you
like, but the human race has it all over robots there. And we
can do it with unskilled labour, too!
