What is that?–ANDROID-a robot made in human form

Image of silver android. What is that?--Android-a robot made in human form

Today is Wednesday, so it’s time for our regular feature What is that? Here’s today’s term:

Android – a robot made in human form or with a human appearance

Robots can come in any shape or size. An android is a robot with a human shape.

Robot playing piano
Photo by Franck V. (unsplash.com/@franckinjapan).
Open hand of an android
Photo by Franck V. (unsplash.com/@franckinjapan).

Scientists, engineers and Sci Fi writers realize that human-shaped robots can be especially useful.  For example, if you want to build a robot that can drive a standard car, the ideal robot is shaped like a human.  It will have feet to push the pedals, two hands to turn the steering wheel and shift gears and it will fit easily in the car seat.  A robot with human-shaped hands can also use all the tools made for humans.

That means a well-made android can do anything a human can do.  And that is much more useful than a round disc-shaped robot that can only sweep the floor.

What is the difference between a cyborg and an android?

Sometimes I still confuse the terms cyborg and android. In last Wednesday’s What is that?, I wrote about cyborgs, which are humans comprised of both natural, organic parts and mechanical parts. In comparison, an android is a robot–usually made of entirely mechanical and electronic parts–but shaped like a human.

You can cover an android with human-like skin and hair, but if the “brain” is still a computer, it’s still an android.

I think about it like this. If a creature starts as human and you add mechanical parts, it’s a cyborg. If a an object is a robot–a machine–and you shape it like a human, it’s an android.

I think that a cyborg–which starts human–remains a cyborg as long as it still has a human brain. I also think an android, which starts as a machine, also remains an android no matter how many human or human-like parts you add, as long as it has a computer operating system at its core. So you can cover an android with human-like skin and hair, but if the “brain” is still a computer, it’s still an android.

Scif Fi novel Cinder compares cyborgs and androids side-by-side

Cinder, by Marissa Meyer, is filled with cyborgs and androids. The title character, Linh Cinder, is a cyborg with a mechanical hand and foot and “optiobionics” in her head that show lights and words across her vision. Cinder, a licensed mechanic, repairs androids and other machines in her marketplace stall.

Cover of Cinder by Marissa Meyer

The book begins with Cinder, surrounded by android parts, removing her own mechanical foot, which she has outgrown. Her android, Iko, finds her a replacement foot.

“She tightened the last screw and stretched out her leg, rolling her ankle forward, back, wiggling the toes. It was a little stiff, and the nerve sensors would need a few days to harmonize with the updated wiring, but at least she wouldn’t have to limp around off-kilter anymore.”

In the same chapter, Prince Kai visits Cinder’s marketplace stall. He brings her an android, a robot that served as his childhood tutor, for Cinder to repair.

“Cinder reached for the android and pulled it to her side of the table. ‘What seems to be wrong with the android, Your Highness?’

“The android looked like it had just stepped off the conveyer belt, but Cinder could tell from the mock-feminine shape that it was an outdated model. The design was sleek, though, with a spherical head atop a pear-shaped body and a glossy white finish.”

. . . .

White android with white bob and camera eyes
Photo by Maximal Focus (unsplash.com/@maximalfocus).

“‘Tutor8.6 model,’ she said, reading the faintly lit panel inside the plastic cranium. The android was nearly twenty years old. Ancient for an android. ‘She looks to be in pristine condition.’

“Raising her fist, she thunked the android hard on the side of its head, barely catching it before it toppled over onto the table. The prince jumped.

“Cinder set the android back on its treads and jabbed the power button but nothing happened. ‘You’d be surprised how often that works.'”

Design your android!

If you built an android, what features would you include?

  • Would you build it in the exact shape of a human or give it treads, like the androids in Cinder?
  • Would you allow its mechanical parts to show or cover it in a synthetic skin?
  • Would you hide secret tools inside or give it only human-like parts and features?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

A review of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline–a sprawling Sci Fi adventure that explores nerd culture from the 1980s to the future

Cover of Ready Player One showing Wade Watts climbing the stacks.

Here’s an introduction to the sprawling science fiction blockbuster Ready Player One

The hero, Wade Watts, is a poor, orphaned teenager, whose real life exists on the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game. He is stuck with a third-level avatar.  “Having a third-level avatar was a colossal embarrassment.”  Wade is a gunter, looking for the creator’s secret Easter Egg hidden in the OASIS.  “The Hunt, as the contest came to be known, quickly wove its way into global culture.  Like winning the lottery, finding Halliday’s Easter egg became a popular fantasy among adults and children alike. . . .  A new subculture was born, composed of the millions of people who now devoted every free moment of their lives to searching for Halliday’s egg.  At first, these individuals were known simply as ‘egg hunters,’ but this was quickly truncated to the nickname ‘gunters.’”

Cover of Ready Player One showing Wade climbing the stacks.

The story begins in the laundry room of Wade’s aunt’s trailer, which is in the Portland Avenue Stacks of Oklahoma City.  The stacks are neighborhoods of trailers-stacked-on-trailers in high-rise fashion.  Wade soon scampers to his hideout, the space in the back of a cargo van buried underneath a mound of discarded cars and trucks, where he can log into the OASIS.

The story moves to the OASIS, where most of the story occurs.  Here’s how Wade describes the OASIS:  “a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis.”

The hero’s best friend is Aech, whose real identity and name were a secret.  “Aech pronounced his own avatar’s name just like the letter ‘H’” and he confided to Wade that his real first name began with the letter “H.”

Cover of Ready Player One showing cast members from the movie.

“Aech’s avatar was a tall, broad-shouldered Caucasian male with dark hair and brown eyes.  I’d asked him once if he looked anything like his avatar in real life, and he’d jokingly replied, ‘Yes.  But in real life, I’m even more handsome.’”

Aech is a senior at OPS #1172, a high school on the virtual education planet Ludus in the OASIS.  “He made quite a bit of dough competing in televised PvP arena games after school and on the weekends.  Aech was one of the highest-ranked combatants in the OASIS, in both the Deathmatch and Capture the Flag leagues.  He was even more famous than Art3mis.”  Aech is also a gunter.

In time, Wade and Aech meet the legendary Art3mis, pronounced “Artemis,” another gunter who is famous for her gunter blog, Arty’s Missives.  “Her avatar had a pretty face, but it wasn’t unnaturally perfect.  In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone.  But Art3mis’s features didn’t look as though they’d been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template.  Her face had the distinctive look of a real person’s, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar.  Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk.”

The villain is Innovative Online Industries (IOI).  IOI “was a global communications conglomerate and the world’s largest Internet service provider.  A large portion of IOI’s business centered around providing access to the OASIS and on selling goods and services inside it.  For this reason, IOI had attempted several hostile takeovers of Gregarious Simulation Systems [which controlled the OASIS], all of which had failed.”  

Stylized cover of Ready Player One showing a cross section of a head where the exposed brain looks like a maze puzzle

IOI also recruited legions of gunters to look for Halliday’s Easter egg.  These mercenaries of the OASIS are called “Sixers” because they all have six-digit employee numbers starting with the numeral “6.”  “To become a Sixer, you had to sign a contract stipulating, among other things, that if you found Halliday’s egg, the prize would become the sole property of your employer. . . .  The company also provided your avatar with high-end armor, vehicles, and weapons, and covered all of your teleportation fares.  Joining the Sixers was a lot like joining the military.”

This story feels like all your best memories of playing video games.  Any kind of game.  If you like space games, first-person shooters, quest games, arcade games, classic Atari, it does not matter.  Ernest Cline included them all in Ready Player One.  There is at least one scene dedicated to every kind of game, even video games that do not exist yet.  (The one exception may be sports games, unless you consider the jousting in Joust to be a sport.)

You should read this book because if you love reading fiction, then you probably love a good escape from reality.  Wade, the ultimate escapist who even goes to school in a virtual world, takes us on an epic journey through every kind of virtual adventure imaginable.

You may also want to read this book if you love 1980s movies, music, games and trivia.  Or if you love geek or nerd culture.  This book is chock full of references to everything we geeks and nerds love.  Everything!

Cover of Ready Player One showing the stacks in green schematic over black

If you read this book, you’d better not mind nerd culture, endless 1980s references, and the word “sucks.”  Wade likes that word a lot and a few other strong words now and then.  And you’d better not mind a long book.  It’s great, but it’s long.

Here’s a good part:  “I walked across the chamber to the foot of the dais.  From here I could see the lich more clearly.  His teeth were two rows of pointed cut diamonds arrayed in a lipless grin, and a large ruby was set in each of his eye sockets.

“For the first time since entering the tomb, I wasn’t sure what to do next.

Cover of Ready Player One showing gate, figure and key in 8-bit

“My chances of surviving one-on-one combat with a demi-lich were nonexistent.  My wimpy +1 Flaming Sword couldn’t even affect him, and the two magic rubies in his eye sockets had the power to suck out my avatar’s life force and kill me instantly.  Even a party of six or seven high-level avatars would have had a difficult time defeating him.”

Have you already read it?  What did you think?

If not, do you have a question about this book?  Give me a try.

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

Cyborg parts–machine hands and feet in Sci Fi can do incredible things

Image of metal android
Cover of Cinder by Marissa Meyer

In the Cinder by Marissa Meyer, Linh Cinder is a licensed mechanic living in New Beijing in the Eastern Commonwealth on Earth. “Cinder was the only full-service mechanic at New Beijing’s weekly market. Without a sign, her booth hinted at her trade only by the shelves of stock android parts that crowded the walls. It was squeezed into a shady cove between a used netscreen dealer and a silk merchant, both of whom frequently complained about the tangy smell of metal and grease that came from Cinder’s booth, even though it was usually disguised by the aroma of honey buns from the bakery across the square. Cinder knew they really just didn’t like being next to her.”

Linh harbors several secrets, some that even she does not know. But one is that she is a cyborg, part human and part machine. In fact, she is 32.68 percent machine.

When we meet her in the marketplace, she is removing the cyborg foot she has outgrown. “Her left hand was steel, tarnished and dark between the joints as if it needed a good cleaning.” She hid both her steel hand and her steel foot from everyone, embarrassed that she is a cyborg.

[SPOILER ALERT!!!]

But by the end of the first volume of the Lunar Chronicles, Linh receives the gift of a new metal hand:

“‘State of the art,’ said Dr. Erland. “‘Fully accessorized. Plated with 100 percent titanium. And look!’ Like a child with a new toy, he fidgeted with the hand’s fingers, revealing a hidden flashlight, stiletto knife, a projectile gun, and screwdriver, and a universal connector cable. ‘It’s a pillar of usefulness. The tranquilizer darts are stored in here.’ He opened a compartment on the palm, revealing a dozen skinny darts. ‘Once your wiring synchronizes, you should be able to load it with a simple thought.”

Design your own cyborg hand!

You are a cyborg–a cybernetic organism–about to board a spaceship on a dangerous mission. What will you design for your own cyborg hand?

  • Will it include weapons, such as a knife or gun?
  • Will you include tools, like a screwdriver, wrench or wirecutters?
  • Will you include any exploring tools like a compass, a GPS, or a magnifying glass?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

What is that?–ANSIBLE-Science fiction writers create fictional devices–like the ansible–to allow characters to communicate quickly across the vast reaches of outer space. Let’s explore ansibles and physics.

Image: Radio telescope dish beneath a starry sky. Text: What is that?–ANSIBLE-Science fiction writers create fictional devices–like the ansible–to allow characters to communicate quickly across the vast reaches of outer space. Let’s explore ansibles and physics.
Photograph by VM_Quezada (unsplash.com@vm_quezada).

Ansible — a machine used for instant communication across vast distances of space.

Sci Fi writers have created many fictional devices that allow people to talk, write, or send messages instantly or very quickly across the vast empty stretches of space.

This is a phonograph. It plays records or discs. But for some reason, I always picture one of these when I hear the word “ansible.” Photo by Sudhith Xavier (www.unsplash.com@sudhithxavier).

The legendary Ursula LeGuin created the word “ansible” in her 1966 novel Rocannon’s World. She described a device that could be used to send instant text messages to anyone else with an ansible.

LeGuin used the ansible in later books as well. By the way, “ansible” is a shortening of the word “answerable,” so-named because the device allowed a person to type a question that could get an “answerable” reply in a reasonable amount of time.

Why do Sci Fi writers need a fictional device?

Why did Le Guin need a fictional communication device? Why couldn’t her characters just send messages using an antenna that sends radio waves?

The problem is the speed of radio waves and the great distances between solar systems.

The Speed of Light

In empty space, radio waves travel at the speed of light. According to the great physicist Albert Einstein, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Even though his theory is more than 100 years old, it is still hard for most people to understand. That’s probably because in our daily lives, the only thing we see traveling at those speeds is light itself. And individual light particles–called photons–are too small and too fast for us to detect with our eyes.

Photo by Jon Geng (unsplash.com/@colourlife).

Light has no mass. It is pure energy. That’s why it can reach such a high speed. But for things with mass–things made out of atoms like you and me and everything we own–we gain mass the faster we travel. At the fastest speeds that humans and machines can travel, the change is barely noticeable. But if you send a ship rocketing through space, the closer it gets to the speed of light, the more its mass grows.

A spaceship floating in space has no weight. But it still has mass. To push it forward faster than it is already traveling requires more energy. Einstein’s law says that the faster you make the ship fly, the more mass it has. That means each time you try to add speed, you need more energy than the last push. Before the ship could ever reach the speed of light, you would run out of energy.

Radio telescope antennas capture radio waves. They can pick up a radio signal, but not send one. Photo by Matheo_JBT (unsplash.com@Matheo_JBT).

What does the speed of light have to do with communication across space?

In science fiction, we often write and read about people traveling to planets in far away solar systems. It takes years for light–even traveling as fast as light does–to reach a planet in another solar system. That means that a communication system that uses radio waves, light or lasers to send messages to a planet outside our solar system would take years. More than a lifetime, if the planet is not near one of our neighboring stars.

Why don’t Sci Fi writers use something real–some technology that we know–other than light or radio waves to send messages then? Well, because nothing travels faster than the speed of light.

Photograph by VM_Quezada (unsplash.com@vm_quezada).

Long distance communication in Sci Fi

It’s hard to write a gripping Sci Fi story if the heroes on a distant planet send an urgent message back home to Earth and then must wait 20, 50 or even a 100 years to receive the reply. Sometimes Sci Fi writers want to tell stories where humans living on different worlds or in spaceships far apart can still talk to each other or communicate in some way.

That’s why LeGuin created the fictional ansible. So her heroes could send messages back home and receive orders from their superiors.

Create your own device!

What kind of fictional device can you imagine to instantly communicate between Earth and a space ship light years away? What would you call it? How would it work?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross