The English word “robot” comes from an ancient word meaning slave. Rabu meant slave in Old Church Slavic. Rabota meant servitude. In Czech, rabota became robota, meaning forced labor, compulsory service, with the connotation of drudgery. Robotnik is Czech for forced worker. The actual word robot, connoting something mechanistic, first appeared in a 1920/1923 Czech play by Karel Capek called “R.U.R.” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”).
“Android” is very similar to “humanoid”—homo, man, andro-, male—the suffix -oid meaning “like” or “resembling in form.” Thus, cuboid means having the shape of a cube and ovoid, the shape of an egg. The -oid suffix may sometimes connote imperfect resemblance and a lesser ontological status, as when Pluto was downgraded from planet to planetoid.
So, if I had to choose, I’d rather be an android than a robot. If the choice is between being labelled a thing “like a human but with lesser status,” or a slave, then I would choose “humanoid.” But the truth is we are robots, through and through.
Wait, you say, why do we not just fly under the banner of “human”? Because “human” is a concept, the essential parts of which are nonsensical, self-contradictory, or just plainly false. Humans have free will. We do not. Humans have a soul. We do not.
Or I should say humans would have a soul, if they existed. But none exist. There is only us, we robots, we unfree humanoids, we who have mistakenly thought ourselves to be human. A mistake we did not realize we had made until very recently. And, furthermore, even as we know we are robots, we have not yet been able to make ourselves believe it.
This blog at Substack will make you believe what you already know. And more importantly this blog at Substack is about what to do once you believe it.