8/07/2007

"Scope stops bad breath": It's The Marketing Stupid

"What are you?," Trout asked the boy scornfully. "Some kind of gutless wonder?"




This too, was the title of a book by Trout, "The Gutless Wonder." It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.

It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.

Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But the he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.


Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade

No comments: