Dedicated to Marvin Minsky and Joseph F. Engelberger, who epitomize (respectively) the theory and practice of robotics 1
Foundation Series 8: The Robots of Dawn Isaac Asimov 1
Elijah Baley found himself in the shade of the tree and muttered to himself,
“I knew it. I’m sweating.”
He paused, straightened up, wiped the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand, then looked dourly at the moisture that covered it.
hate sweating,” he said to no one, throwing it out as a cosmic law. And once again he felt annoyance with the Universe for making something both essential and unpleasant.
One never perspired (unless one wished to, of course) in the City, where temperature and humidity were absolutely controlled and where it was never absolutely necessary for the body to perform in ways that made heat production greater than heat removal.
Now that was civilized.
He looked out into the field, where a straggle of men and women were, more or less, in his charge.
They were mostly youngsters in their late teens, but included some middle-aged people like himself. They were hoeing inexpertly and doing a variety of other things that robots were designed to do-and could do much more efficiently had they not been ordered to stand aside and Wait while the human beings stubbornly practiced.
