A pedantic rant…

Updated on September 24, 2008 By Ken Begg 8 Comments

Stop calling Terminators ‘cyborgs.’  They’re robots.  They wear flesh like humans wear clothes.  When stripped of all organic tissue, they function exactly the same.  Yeesh.  Nearly thirty years of this.  Enough already.

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  • fish eye no miko

    Who calls them cyborgs? Cuz, yeah, weird.

  • fish eye no miko

    WTF? I know I replied! Why are all my replies disappearing? )-:

  • Actually, even Cameron calls them cyborgs, which is strange as he generally knows his sci-fi.

    What set this off was a article on this year’s TV shows that again called the Terminators cyborgs.

  • Ericb

    Robocop is a cyborg, R.O.T.O.R. is a robot.

  • Yep, pretty much.

    Steve Austin – Cyborg.
    Bigfoot – Robot.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Yeah, both the first two movies refer to the as “cyborgs.”

    However, it does make a certain amount of sense. Terminators were supposed to be infiltrators, so they needed human flesh to do their work. Without the flesh, they’re less effective at what they were designed to do. The flesh wasn’t essential to their functioning, but they needed it (the same way we need clothes, in fact, though that doesn’t make US cyborgs).

    Secondly, the flesh they have is still alive, so somehow the robotic part must keep it alive–feed it and so forth. (Unless the skin is only supposed to last for a few days.) So there must be some kind of system that links the two (flesh and machine) together. So, something of a cyborg then.

  • Happy-go-lucky

    Aren’t they technically androids? You know robots that look like human?

  • BeckoningChasm

    I’ve always understood the term “android” to mean an artificially created man–not necessarily created through technological means. I think Frankenstein’s monster qualifies as an android.

    “Robot” I’ve always taken as a mechanical being.

    The “Robots” from Capek’s play R.U.R. were created through chemical processes, so they were technically androids and not robots (so I’ve heard, I haven’t read the play).