Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 107: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

* AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION enough to be practicable. We need a unit which can recog- nise a command and act upon it. Something which can anticipate, correlate, and be aware, in a mechanical sense, of course, of the various functions of diverse pieces of equipment. Take you, for example. At this moment you know that the furnace needs attention, the windows will soon have to be closed, the floors need sweeping and the air conditioner checked and regulated. To be aware of all that, and, at the same time, be ready to obey a command if given, takes quite a bit of doing. For a machine, that is. A man can do it on his head, but a machine needs several thousand banks of yes-no relays, plus several thousand more ‘memory’ banks, plus the activating relays to con- trol the electronic equipment. Think of the variables you ordinarily meet in, say, driving a car, and then try to build a machine to drive a car as well as a man.” He shrugged. *“You’d need a ten-ton truck 106 to carry it—and then it wouldn’t be as efficient as a man.” I nodded. None of this was really new to me, but Slats had clarified the “robot” problem quite a bit. I frowned over it, half-afraid to ask a question in case I should be thought dumb. Still, you don’t learn anything if you don’t ask, and a caretaker wasn’t supposed to be _ intelligent, anyway. “Suppose you used the brain from a man? I mean suppose you took a living brain and hooked it onto your equipment, would it work?” . “It might,” said Slats, | seriously, and to my relief he didn’t laugh. “I suppose that we could keep it alive by pumping oxygenated blood and nutrients through it. It certainly contains enough cells and yes-no relays for what we need.”’ He nodded as if the thought were new to him. “It probably would at that.” Clarkson came in then and I got busy sweeping the floor. comicbooks.com