the origin of cultibotics in science fiction

To be quite truthful, the dream of having robots take over the task of managing productive land isn't really mine in the sense of having originated it. To be sure I've contributed some detail, but others dreamt it before myself.

The best example of which I'm aware, Robert Silverberg's The World Inside, describes a world divided between urban towers and the land between them. The land between is tended by machines which are themselves tended by people, a rural population with a very different culture from that found in the urban towers.

While the world Silverberg describes is more of a dystopia than a utopia, not least because it is fast approaching limits that it steadfastly denies, that aspect of the book, the use of intelligent machines to enable a superior grade of land management than could be achieved without them, rings true.

Reading that book was most likely the beginning of my own obsession with the subject, although I don't clearly remember how it started.