ABSTRACT
Different people, with different motivations, in different settings, tell stories of robots, but the storied world of robots seems to tap into a widely shared socio-technical imaginary. This chapter discusses the “collectively held” imaginaries of robots in a storied world and begins to explore how posthumanist humans form collectives with materials and each other. The machines that many consider forerunners of robots are called “automata” or “automate”, terms that refer to an engine or a machine that moves by itself. The purpose of automata and later humanoid robots differed from the functionality of almost all other kinds of tools like watches or industrial machines that later became known as “robots”. Real humanoid robots come with a human-like form – two arms, legs, a torso and head and “humanoid” is the umbrella term for all the types of robots that replaced the automatons as machines with a human-like appearance: android, replicants, fembot, gynoid, and “geminoid”.
