As Aub's funeral proceeds, his supervisor realizes that even with Aub dead, the advancement of Graphitics is unstoppable. They also plan to replace their computer-operated ships with lower cost, more expendable (in their opinion) crewed ships and manned missiles, to continue the war.Īub is so upset by the appropriation of his discovery for military purposes that he commits suicide, aiming a protein depolarizer at his head and dropping instantly and painlessly dead. But it is appropriated by the military establishment, who use it to re-invent their understanding of mathematics. The discovery is demonstrated to senior programmer Shuman, who realizes the value of it. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm-a development which is later dubbed 'Graphitics'. The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting. Clarke's 1960 story ' Into the Comet' is in a similar vein.

The story is representative of the genre of sci-fi that started in the 1950s as a reaction to computers, around the theme of caution against human mental atrophy in the computer era. In the introduction to Robot Visions, Asimov lists this story as one of the notable robot stories. The story first appeared in the February 1958 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the 1959 collection Nine Tomorrows, the 1969 retrospective Opus 100, the 1970 anthology The Stars Around Us, and the 1986 collection Robot Dreams.

' The Feeling of Power' is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov.

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Užslinks naktis by Isaac Asimov