Android (robot)

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest use (as "Androides") to Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia, in reference to an automaton that St. Albertus Magnus allegedly created.^[3][7] By the late 1700s, "androides", elaborate mechanical devices resembling humans performing human activities, were displayed in exhibit halls.^[8][1] The term "android" appears in US patents as early as 1863 in reference to miniature human-like toy automatons.^[9] The term android was used in a more modern sense by the French author Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam in his work Tomorrow's Eve (1886), featuring an artificial humanoid robot named Hadaly.^[3] The term made an impact into English pulp science fiction starting from Jack Williamson's The Cometeers (1936) and the distinction between mechanical robots and fleshy androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future stories (1940–1944).^[3]


Although Karel Čapek's robots in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1921)—the play that introduced the word robot to the world—were organic artificial humans, the word "robot" has come to primarily refer to mechanical humans, animals, and other beings.^[3] The term "android" can mean either one of these,^[3] while a cyborg ("cybernetic organism" or "bionic man") would be a creature that is a combination of organic and mechanical parts.


The term "droid", popularized by George Lucas in the original Star Wars film and now used widely within science fiction, originated as an abridgment of "android", but has been used by Lucas and others to mean any robot, including distinctly non-human form machines like R2-D2. The word "android" was used in Star Trek: The Original Series episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" The abbreviation "andy", coined as a pejorative by writer Philip K. Dick in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, has seen some further usage, such as within the TV series Total Recall 2070.^[10]


While the term "android" is used in reference to human-looking robots in general (not necessarily male-looking humanoid robots), a robot with a female appearance can also be referred to as a gynoid. Besides one can refer to robots without alluding to their sexual appearance by calling them anthrobots (a portmanteau of anthrōpos and robot; see anthrobotics) or anthropoids (short for anthropoid robots; the term humanoids is not appropriate because it is already commonly used to refer to human-like organic species in the context of science fiction, futurism and speculative astrobiology).^[11]


Authors have used the term android in more diverse ways than robot or cyborg. In some fictional works, the difference between a robot and android is only superficial, with androids being made to look like humans on the outside but with robot-like internal mechanics.^[3] In other stories, authors have used the word "android" to mean a wholly organic, yet artificial, creation.^[3] Other fictional depictions of androids fall somewhere in between.^[3]


Eric G. Wilson, who defines an android as a "synthetic human being", distinguishes between three types of android, based on their body's composition:


Although human morphology is not necessarily the ideal form for working robots, the fascination in developing robots that can mimic it can be found historically in the assimilation of two concepts: simulacra (devices that exhibit likeness) and automata (devices that have independence).