Word: metallize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this year for the Swedish market, where he has sold about 1,000 of them. This fall a Fort Lauderdale cemetery operator, Cem-A-Care of Florida, started importing them into the U.S. They will sell for $125, as compared with about $1,250 for a conventional wood or metal casket. Cem-A-Care hopes to market 7,500 of the cardboard models next year. Florida funeral directors, however, are opposed to the cardboard caskets because they could cause a drop in their profits on a burial...
...General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth, one of Cincinnati Milacron's T-3 robots makes sheet-metal parts for the F-16 fighter. The T-3 selects bits from a tool rack, drills a set of holes to a .005-in. tolerance and machines the perimeters of 250 types of parts. A man doing the same job can produce six parts per shift, with a 10% rejection rate. The robot makes 24 to 30 parts, with zero rejections. The machine costs over $60,000 and has saved $93,000 in its first year...
Already there are a few rumblings. Says Russ Cook, U.A.W. district committeeman at GM's Buick plant in Flint: "If we don't get smarter and start combatting the machines, we will be cannibalizing ourselves and competing against one another for jobs." Adds Larry Jones, a Chrysler metal-shop worker: "They say they are only going to put robots on boring jobs. But in an auto plant, all the jobs are boring jobs...
These were mere toys, however, compared with the persistent and half-forbidden dream of an artificial man.-* St. Albertus Magnus, the 13th century German philosopher, was said to have spent 30 years constructing a servant of "deceptively human appearance" out of metal, wood, glass, wax and leather. This creature allegedly opened the door to Albertus' cell at the Dominican monastery in Cologne, asked visitors what they wanted and even engaged them in polite conversation. The end of the legend was that Albertus' celebrated pupil, Thomas Aquinas, smashed the robot to pieces because he considered it demonic. The Swiss...
...admirable theory, but the whole tradition of the demonic robot assumes that when a metal creature feels immortal longings, no mere law can rein him in. Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated that in 2001. The computer HAL not only operates the space ship and talks in a supercilious tenor but is so exalted by its own superiority ("I am incapable of making an error") that it starts killing the astronauts who interfere with its plans. In a 1976 MGM effort titled Demon Seed, a presumptuous robot goes even further and fulfills the sinful ambition of making Julie Christie pregnant. But then...