After reading "Hellfire at Twilight", I got curious as to the difference between the definition of a cyborg and an android. So a cyborg, according to wikipedia, is "an organism with both artificial and natural parts" and an android is a robot that's suppose to look and act like a human.
I was wondering if the lines between these categories could ever become a bit blurry. Can the robot in "Tideline" be considered an android because of her ability to express human-like emotions even though she doesn't look like a human? Or is she just a robot with empathetic abilities? Does any combination of amounts of human or artificial parts make one a cyborg? Can a cyborg be a robot that has a human part (like the heart or brain or something) integrated into its circuitry?
Anyone have any ideas because robotics is not my specialty.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
PS: I have no idea how to make it stop highlighted the one word. Computers are also not my specialty
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting thing to think about. I think you would have to define "parts", as do emotions count as natural "parts"? But personally, I think that those emotions, although genuine, are artifical. Chaulcedony (sp?) was programmed to "feel". If that part of her code was deleted or corrupted, she would no longer "feel" anything.
ReplyDeleteThis is evident in how she views the dog. She has no feeling for the dog, because she was not programmed to have feelings for the dog. Only when what she was programmed to have feeling for shows he has feelings for the dog, she goes through her archives as to why.
However, the line still remains blurry if you analyze things through a different perspective.
So... replace a humans outside (bones, skin) with metal. Cyborg. Replace digestive system with basically solar/battery/gas power. Cyborg. Replace nerves with wires. Cyborg. Replace circulatory system with tubes and filters. Whats left? Heart and brain (assuming I havent blatantly missed some organs, and if I have, replace them with a robotic counterpart).
If you replace the brain with a harddrive or equivalent computer piece. You are left with a robot with a literal heart. Is this a cyborg? It has a human part after all...
Yet... if you then take the last step and replace the heart that does nothing at this point but pump fluids around with a mechanical pump. You have a full android that is only slightly different from the previous example.
I think she's a robot, not an android. She wasn't acting human so much as she was programmed to think like a human. She only felt what her creator wanted her to feel. It felt like she was mimicking human behavior rather than actually feeling anything.
ReplyDeleteRobot, she may have felt emotions but it was because was programmed to--it wasn't something new she learned all by herself.
ReplyDelete