Machine Intelligence
A robot or other artificial being designed to resemble a human and often made from a flesh-like material.
Historically, these robots were completely within the domain of science fiction and frequently seen in film and television, but recent advances in robot technology now allow the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.
What is an android?
This term for faster-than-light travel was popularized by Star Trek and Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, and introduced by John W. Campbell in his 1931 novel Islands of Space. Unlike a "jump drive" which permits instantaneous travel between 2 points, this technology includes measurable passage of time.
What is "warp drive"?
While a telepath can read thoughts, an ____ is capable of reading the emotions of others by some form of ESP.
What is an "empath"?
In this HBO television series (reboot), scientists and businessmen in the distant future collaborate to create a vast amusement park in the style of the Old West, populating it with artificially intelligent robots (or “hosts”) that are so advanced that they are completely indistinguishable from human beings.
What is Westworld?
A 2008 American computer-animated science fiction film. It follows a solitary trash compactor robot on a future, uninhabitable, deserted Earth, left to clean up garbage. However, he is visited by a probe sent by the starship Axiom, a robot called EVE, with whom he falls in love and pursues across the galaxy.
What is Wall-E?
Short for "cybernetic organism," this is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts.
Example: a human being with visibly mechanical parts, such as Darth Vader from Star Wars or The Borg from Star Trek.
What is a cyborg?
An action that refers to technological teleportation (verb). Star Trek's Scotty is generally in charge of this--disassembling matter at one location and reassembling it atom-by-atom at another location.
What is "to beam"?
This describes a social group that seems to think and act with a single mind.
James H. Schmitz was the first person to dub a collective alien intelligence with this term in his 1950 story Second Night of Summer, in which humans on another planet are attacked by the Halpa, aliens who are believed to have this class of intelligence. In 1973, it would meander outside of science fiction to describe bureaucracy.
What is "hive mind"?
A hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with one's own. The term (in contrast to alternate reality or alternate history) is more general, without implying a relationship, or lack of relationship, with our own universe.
What is a "parallel universe"?
More recent versions of this weapon are called "phaser" (Star Trek) and "lightsaber" or "blaster" (Star Wars), this 1914 version from the film The Exploits of Elaine is an instrument that concentrates infrared rays into a deadly beam that could kill a person if aimed at their brain, one that could only be deflected by a platinum shield backed with asbestos.
What is a "death ray"?
A type of robot, this term refers to a sentient computer
What is artificial intelligence? (What is A.I.?)
This technology can protect a spaceship from weapons fire. Other examples include a "tractor beam," "antigrav," and other hypothetical technology that interacts with a material object in the ways that magnetic fields interact with magnetized ones.
What is a "forcefield"?
This popular figure in both novels and films is from a race and homeworld that remain unnamed, and he is merely said to be of a "species unknown." However, its characteristic speech patterns (anastrophe) are easily recognizable by fans, and the new "baby" version was introduced to cinema in 2019.
Who is Yoda?
In the society in this film, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.
What is The Matrix?
In this 2000 movie, based on a book, Japanese schoolchildren are forced to compete in games where only one child survives. It is often assumed the inspiration for Suzanne Collin's American book The Hunger Games.
What is Battle Royale?
This is a word describing a shared computerized space, what author Gibson described in his 1984 novel Neuromancer as "a con sensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation"
What is cyberspace?
The word comes from a term associated with the study of materials at low temperature; its root coined in 1875 to describe refrigerants.
Robert Ettinger seized on the idea of freezing one's body for future revival after reading Neil R. Jones' 1931 story The Jameson Satellite when he was just 12 years old.
What is cryostasis?
An abbreviation for "beyond Earth" this refers to an alien or object not of our world, as well as a loveable creature who enjoys Reeces Pieces from Steven Spielberg's 1982 film of the same name.
What is "E.T." the extra-terrestrial.
The plot of this 2002 science fiction neo-noir film plot centers around a trio of psychics called "precogs", who see future images called "previsions" of crimes yet to be committed. These images are processed by "Precrime," a specialized police department, which apprehends the criminals based on the precogs' foreknowledge.
What is Minority Report?
An attempt to counteract global warming through climate engineering in 2014 backfires catastrophically, causing an ice age and extinguishing nearly all life; only animals that can adapt to sub-zero temperatures and the inhabitants of a circumnavigational train survive.
What is Snowpiercer?
This term has one of the most famous origin stories: Karel Čapek used a Czech word for forced feudal labor for the title of his 1921 play Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti.
What is "robot"?
Ursula K. Le Guin coined this word for a device for instantaneous communication across the vast distances of space in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World.
HINT: A 2001 Usenet post by Dave Goldman claims that Le Guin told him the word comes from "answerable" and that she was amused to learn that word is also an anagram for "lesbian."
What is "ansible"?
When 2 technologically advanced races meet in deep space and figure out a way to trade despite their presumed mistrust, it is called _______.
Murray Leinster coined this phrase with the title of his 1945 novella. When a Star Trek movie of the same name was released in 1996, Leinster's heirs sued Paramount Pictures for trademark violation.
What is "first contact"?
A term for the art of modifying planetary surface conditions to resemble those of (idealized) Earth, including both macroengineering (such as the diversion of comets to provide water and volatile gasses) and seeding with tailored organisms.
What is "terraforming"?
On Oct 30, 1938, a radio performance of a 1898 story of alien invasion by H.G. Wells leads to widespread panic and new regulations requiring disclaimers for future fiction stories.
What is War of the Worlds?