Folk - sorry, I am sure you get a lot of this.
I love my science fiction, books, movies and TV but am haunted by the memories of a book I read years ago when employed by Honeywell Information Systems. The reason that is significant is that I am certain the book was written by someone employed at some time by them.
It has to be a 1970's or early 80's publication and its resonates at the moment because it has been proven to be very prophetic.
The story was based on an artificial planet where you lived on the inner side of the shell. They have a central super computer that had a complex network that ensured if any damage occured it had built in redundancy and could continue operating without fail - it managed the environment and all the labour intensive 'stuff' whilst the scientists monitored the ecosystem.
The computer deployed a variety of specialised drones that did it's calling - repair work, heavy shifting etc.
The scientist started to test the super computers ability to deal with random incidents by distrupting its tasks by breaking network cables and power lines running in large cable ducting. It would send a repair drone out, find the break in power and repair the damage. The scientists kept doing distructive things and the robots repaired the damage including welding when pipes were damaged etc.
The computer in an attempt to work out why these problems had manifested had attached video to a number of drones and had spotted that 'unknown' things were the cause and then also spotted one being hurt when a gas leak ignited and burnt one of them.
It then equipped some drones with flamethrowers and took a more direct action to stop the 'unknowns' from making instead of performing repairs.
A battle ensued.
I love my science fiction, books, movies and TV but am haunted by the memories of a book I read years ago when employed by Honeywell Information Systems. The reason that is significant is that I am certain the book was written by someone employed at some time by them.
It has to be a 1970's or early 80's publication and its resonates at the moment because it has been proven to be very prophetic.
The story was based on an artificial planet where you lived on the inner side of the shell. They have a central super computer that had a complex network that ensured if any damage occured it had built in redundancy and could continue operating without fail - it managed the environment and all the labour intensive 'stuff' whilst the scientists monitored the ecosystem.
The computer deployed a variety of specialised drones that did it's calling - repair work, heavy shifting etc.
The scientist started to test the super computers ability to deal with random incidents by distrupting its tasks by breaking network cables and power lines running in large cable ducting. It would send a repair drone out, find the break in power and repair the damage. The scientists kept doing distructive things and the robots repaired the damage including welding when pipes were damaged etc.
The computer in an attempt to work out why these problems had manifested had attached video to a number of drones and had spotted that 'unknown' things were the cause and then also spotted one being hurt when a gas leak ignited and burnt one of them.
It then equipped some drones with flamethrowers and took a more direct action to stop the 'unknowns' from making instead of performing repairs.
A battle ensued.
