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"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff."
- William Gibson
 |
| Mandroid | ||
| A humanoid robot; a robot in the shape of a person. |
There are hundreds of thousands of robots working in factories today. But they don’t look anything like a human being; their shape is dependent on their function.
| I turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, molded into the nuscle configuration of an archetypal human male.The head was carved into furows to represent thick back-combed hair... The green photoreceptor gaze regarded me gravely. The mandroid became quite still... On Harlan's World, you don't see many mandroids. They're expensive to build, compared to a synthetic or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. |
| Technovelgy from Altered Carbon,
by Richard Morgan. Published by Del Rey in 2003 Additional resources -
|
Morgan has some interesting things to say about the use of humanoid robots; his perspective is that machines are expensive, but human labor is cheap, because there are so many of them and they reproduce cheaply.
This word seems to derive from a cheesy science fiction movie of the early 1990’s. It is also the name of a “breakdancer / producer / plasterer from Barnsley in South Yorkshire.”
The term has also surfaced in The X-Files. In the episode "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'", when Blaine Faulkner is describing his encounter with Mulder, he describes him this way: "And the other one, the tall lanky one, his face was so blank and expressionless. He didn't seem human. I think he was a mandroid. The only time he reacted was when he saw the dead alien."
(Thanks to Justin for writing in.)
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Altered Carbon
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and Technology by Richard Morgan
Tech news articles related to Altered Carbon
Tech news articles related to works by Richard Morgan
Mandroid-related
news articles:
- Tesla Bot Humanoid 'Robot' Vs. Boston Dynamics Atlas Parkour Robot
| Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army |
| Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto |
| HandelBot Helps Two-Handed Robots Learn Piano |
| Woven Fiber Electronic Skin For Robots |
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
