Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
|
|
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is a fictional company from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the series, the SCC is responsible for the design and creation of a wide range of robots and labour-saving devices, such as lifts, automatic doors, ventilation systems, the infamous Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, digital watches (substituted for polyphonic ringtones in the 2005 radio series), and perhaps most famously of all, Marvin the Paranoid Android. Its complaints division has the slogan Share and Enjoy.
When a person asks for a drink from the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, the dispenser probes the customer's taste sensors and pleasure receptors of the brain. Despite its sophisticated artificial intelligence, it always dispenses the same drink: a concoction that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea".
The SCC invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities ("GPP") which imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and "terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side" are due to unresolved bugs in his software.
Quote from the book:
- The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints Department, which, according to the series, takes up the major landmasses on three planets. The (fictional) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines its marketing division as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," and an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."