Just to add to the vgeneral discussion, when I was a kid there was a broad distinction in science fiction between mechanical automatons, which were called “robots” and biologically-based automatons, which were called :“androids”. The convention was created by science fiction author Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977), arguably one of the creators of the “space opera” genre. The distinction was important to him because he wrote most of the “Captain Future” stories. Captain Future (real name: Curtis Newton) had three companions – Grag, who was a mechanical robot, Otho, a synthetic biological “android”, and Simon Wright, whose brain has been removed from his aged and disabled body and is stored in a box. Hamilton went on to write for DC comics, as well, and used the same distinctions in the stories he wrote about Superman and others. The distinction was so honored by other writers that it made it into the influential Science Fiction Encyclopedia . The online version still recognizes that Hamilton made the istinction, but doesn’t insist on it (see SFE: Androids )
The lines between “robots” and “androids” started blurring after 1977, not only because of Hamilton’s death but, I strongly suspect, because George Lucas’ Star Wars movies started using the term “droids” for robots (In the original 1977 movies the word “robots” is used only once – "If they [the Storm Troopers] followed the robots to the Jawas, then that might have lead them backs to… – , and I don’t recall it being used ever again in the franchise.)
What’s interesting is that, using Hamilton’s definitions, Czapek’s “robots” are really androids, while Star Wars’ “droids” are really robots.
When I was a kid (1980s or so), “android” just meant “robot with a humanoid shape”. By this definition, both Data and C-3PO were androids, but R2D2 wasn’t (even though “droid” clearly derives from “android”, they’re not synonymous).
Yeah; and a robot with a human brain is a cyborg. On the other hand a human with a robot brain is also a cyborg but of an entirely different kind - it seems that the concept ‘cyborg’ is a broad church.
The idea of a short-lived replicant a la Bladerunner makes no real sense to me; the most difficult thing about making a human-like mentality is surely making a working human-like brain, so why is the body so ephemeral?
Similarly, the ‘robots’ in Karel Capek’s original play were limited in some respects but not others - why did Capek make the assumption they would become slaves, if they had competent working human-like brains? I assume this was a consequence of the political zeitgeist of Central Europe in that era - plenty of humans in that period were considered to be subhuman and only worth enslaving and/or working to death.
Yeah, but Hamiltonian “androids” were artificial creations from scratch, not human brains transplanted into artificial bodies. “cyborg” – short for “cybernetic organism” – appears tto have been used for all kinds of creations where a pre-existing biological creature has mechanical parts implanted or replaced. A Broad Church, indeed.
I noticed that way back in 1977. R2-D2 is definitely not an android.
Actually my SF project asked Lucas’ organisation for permission to use the term ‘droid’ to mean robot, way back in 2005 or so; they said no.This is a copyrighted term.
I labored endlessly trying to put boxes around “robot” and “android”. They’ve been used inconsistently for the century since R.U.R. “Android” was a term the French used from the 1700s for humanoid clockwork automatons. (Don’t get me started on “humanoid.”) These terms are a partial listing of what writers have coined: cybernaut, anabot, fembot, sexbot, synthbot, synthopoid, bot, droid, drone, humanoid, mecha, cyborg, terminator, transformer, transmorpher, simulacrum, animatronic, robotoid, replicant, electroid, mandroid.
I spent two full pages in the Introduction to my robot book beating my head against the wall of this nightmare. I never found a really satisfactory solution.
Don’t forget “gynoid”, coined because the root “andros” means “man” rather than “human” (i.e., it’s specifically male), so a robot that would otherwise be considered an “android” but is female in form is a “gynoid”.
I’ve never seen it used, but I suppose that this would make a robot in the form of a human of indeterminate or no gender an “anthroid”.
But for “robot”, I would say that that’s a machine that senses its environment in some way and, at least to some degree, autonomously reacts to that environment. The others may or may not be subsets of that: For instance, an animatronic most likely either moves and acts according to a set script regardless of what happens around it, or is controlled directly by a human, and so would not typically be a robot, but you could make an animatronic that was a robot.
I would say you have to go by the literal word: a robot is a machine that autonomously performs some task. I think this is more or less what you say. So, a robot may not have anything even remotely resembling a human form, and is therefore not necessarily a type of android. A remotely controlled puppet or waldo is also not a robot. A robot is probably, but I feel not absolutely necessarily, a type of cybernetic mechanism [I do not want to use the word “cyborg” for this because that suggests something else], that is, it senses its environment and reacts accordingly in a feedback loop. All but the most rudimentary robots will incorporate some cybernetic components.
The “org” in “cyborg” is short for “organism”. Leave that off, and you’ve just got the cybernetics, which is accurate.
I did once build a robot without any solid-state electronic components. It used a feeler whisker on a microswitch to navigate mazes. But that falls under your criterion of “the most rudimentary of robots”.
Cybernetic systems need not even be electronic, in general— they could be purely mechanical, for instance, or biological— that is not the problem. If I am not overlooking anything, I think the reason your robot was not cybernetic is that, while it has a crude sensor, there is no sort of feedback loop; the output of the sensor does not directly influence anything which is fed back to the robot (its only input is the state of that switch!) Whereas if you put a camera on it, and an accelerometer, etc., whatever it did to traverse the maze would end up being highly cybernetic.
But the question then becomes; if a robot is entirely biological in nature, like Kapek’s version, why is it not a cyborg? You could build a biological body out of biological materials, but if you use any human (or animal) components, it becomes a cyborg and isn’t a robot any more. Basically, to create a biological robot (according to Kapek’s vision), you must re-invent every biological component, muscle, bone and nerve, right down to the cellular level, to make something that already exists in nature. That all seems a lot of work for something that has already been acheived by blind evolution.
To fill in a nonobvious blank, I suspect that George Lucas started using the word “droid” after seeing the 1972 movie *Silent Running, which had three robot “drones” named Huey, Dewey, and Louie (presumably after Donald Duck’s nephews). And I assume the screenwriters (or maybe director/producer/SPX leader Doug Trumbull) were looking for something different to call their mechanical helpers.
I’m just getting back here, and seeing these responses to my earlier post, so forgive me for shlepping the thread backwards. The “explanation” referred to below concerns the pronunciation of the word “robot.”
I pronounce “cot” and “caught” differently. “Cot” contains a pure vowel /ɔ/, and it is pronounced like the vowel in “not.” For me, “caught” contains a diphthong, that is not pronounced /ɔ/, and not even the single diphthong found in Czech.
[Disscussing the “robo” pronunciation:]
That is puzzling. The Prague premiere was in1921; the US (English) premiere in 1922; the UK premiere in 1923; and the France (French) premiere in 1926. But I suppose it is quite possible to have seen the word without ever hearing it. I know a lot of people who thought Gal Gadot’s last name was pronounced like “Godot” in Waiting for Godot, and I can see why, since Israeli names are unfamiliar to Americans who are not Jewish. Czech was probably very unfamiliar to people in the US and UK in the 1920s.
Yes. Čapek was not from Prague, but he spent most of his life there, and wrote R.U.R. It premiered professionally (there was a very short “workshop” production in N. Bohemia) in Prague in 1921, with a Czech director who was native to Prague, and ran an impressive 7 years.
Supposedly, Čapek spoke in an odd monotone. Not sure how this affected his pronunciation of words, but I’ll guess that it flattened that one diphthong Czech does have. So even if “robot” did originally have it, it probably would have disappeared when Čapek said it.
The stem, “robo” goes back to Proto-Slavonic (or Slavic, sometimes), the parent language of all the Slavic languages, which was a vernacular about the same time the various language in the isles of the current UK solidified into Old English.
“Robo” meant slave. It means “work” now, in Czech, Slovak, and Russian, and it’s the most common work for it, but Czech does have a word for work you are happy to do, whether it’s compensated, or some kind of charity work, and the word is “práce” in Chech, or for English speakers, “pratseh.” Short A, more like “apple,” than “hall.” “Práce” isn’t especially common. Used for charity work, and to emphasize how much you love your job, if that is the case. Not really sarcastically, though, because the word isn’t that strong. But in the middle ages, serfs did “robota,” while landowners did “práce.”
BTW, “Czech,” a word long-used in the US, is the Polish spelling; the Czech spelling-- and also Slovak spelling-- is Čech, but while that is verbatim “Czech,” the most common word in Czech for referring to Czech as a singular nominative, is čeština, and it is feminine. It’s pronounced “chestina.” Sounds like the name “Christina.”
And now for something completely different.
Making a person takes parents, and not to put to fine a point on it, but a pregnancy. Putting a woman though a pregnancy to make a slave you are going to take away from her is cruel, and may be cruel to the father as well. It would have been cruel to my husband.
A parentless (family-less) being with no one missing it, or mourning its misfortune in being selected to be a robot/slave whatever, is grievous only to that person-- it doesn’t spread outward. And isn’t going to spark protest a rebellion the way taking babies from their parents would be.
There’s also evidence that raising children en masse, without parental figures, or affection, or choices, makes adults who are not good workers. But imagine the grief and rebellion of removing people from their families as 13, or 17 -never to return- We’ve seen what drafting young men to serve two years in the military can do.
There’s also the problem of what to do with children found to have problems they didn’t exhibit at birth, but make them unsuitable for involuntary servitude. Do you return them to their parents when they are 5? 10? Expect their parents to take on the work and expense of raising them, with their attendant issues at that point? or do you simply euthanize them?
I think that’s a bit too broad. Consider, for instance, a simple stamping machine in a factory: It has rollers that feed out a meter of sheet metal, and then a die that stamps some shape into the metal, then more rollers that dump the stamped shape into a bin. It’ll keep on doing that blindly, and if the roll of sheet metal runs out, it’ll go on stamping the empty bed. That machine does autonomously perform its task, but it does so without any sensing of its environment, and therefore wouldn’t be a robot.
I’m unsure of precisely how much sensing it would need to qualify, though. For instance, one simple modification to such a machine would be to add a sensor to detect when the sheet metal runs out, which stops the machine and sounds a buzzer for it to be restocked. That still doesn’t feel like it’s enough to count as a robot, but maybe it is? On the other hand, a factory machine that can take an input part in any orientation, and orients it correctly before it does whatever it is that it does, does seem like it merits the term “robot”.
An interesting take on the concept. Perhaps one way to produce parentless slaves would be to use Craig Venter’s method of creating ‘new’ life; appropriate DNA from a wide range of donors, and incorporate this material into a pre-existing but empty egg cell. If you get the mix of DNA right you could be guaranteed a humanoid baby with so many parents that it effectively has none.
If you don’t use Venter’s method, you’d need to design the entire humanoid body from scratch - or design something completely different, maybe with ten pairs of hands or something. I don’t think that a biological robot would be viable without some sort of DNA, so you’d have to design that as well.