You moved a bit quickly past the 'slave' part of the robot/orphan etymological cluster; 'slave' seems to come ultimately from 'Slav' (via the conquered/imprisoned/enslaved route). Cognates of "slave" are all over Romance languages, but (unsurprisingly) not in Slavic languages, which mostly use 'rob-' words. FWIW, the Czech 'otrok' seems to originate as a compound word meaning 'unable to speak for him/herself', which might explain why the same word means 'slave' in Czech and 'child' in Slovenian (cf 'infans', which literally means 'unable to speak').
If we're talking about embodiment, or indeed ensoulment - the uncanny, man[sic]-made embodiment of a non-soul in a robot body, taken to its extreme by the seeming ensoulment of a bodiless head, then Joi is particularly interesting. An AI programmed into your living quarters can see you while you're sleeping & know when you're awake; it can also project a hologrammatic representation of a human body and a human face, with eyes and nose. What it can't do is look at you *with those eyes* - and yet this is precisely what Joi does. She's embodied in thin air. (Joi's even more interesting if you're a thirteen-year-old boy, as indeed is a lot of the decor of the film. I guess that's another route to the uncanny - "Someone who makes you this horny's got to be real, right? Surprise!" Weird Science and Blade Runner 2049...)
It also strikes me that Morpheus, as well as being the name of the god of dreams whose stories should on no account be believed, rhymes with 'Orpheus'. But I don't know where to go with that!
There's much more to be said about slavery (I've added a bit, to the original post) but you're right. And infans is fascinating: the dyad in "Star Wars" is one fey gold robot who can speak literally a million languages, and one trundling pedal-bin whose only language is, literally, beep-beep-boop.
You moved a bit quickly past the 'slave' part of the robot/orphan etymological cluster; 'slave' seems to come ultimately from 'Slav' (via the conquered/imprisoned/enslaved route). Cognates of "slave" are all over Romance languages, but (unsurprisingly) not in Slavic languages, which mostly use 'rob-' words. FWIW, the Czech 'otrok' seems to originate as a compound word meaning 'unable to speak for him/herself', which might explain why the same word means 'slave' in Czech and 'child' in Slovenian (cf 'infans', which literally means 'unable to speak').
If we're talking about embodiment, or indeed ensoulment - the uncanny, man[sic]-made embodiment of a non-soul in a robot body, taken to its extreme by the seeming ensoulment of a bodiless head, then Joi is particularly interesting. An AI programmed into your living quarters can see you while you're sleeping & know when you're awake; it can also project a hologrammatic representation of a human body and a human face, with eyes and nose. What it can't do is look at you *with those eyes* - and yet this is precisely what Joi does. She's embodied in thin air. (Joi's even more interesting if you're a thirteen-year-old boy, as indeed is a lot of the decor of the film. I guess that's another route to the uncanny - "Someone who makes you this horny's got to be real, right? Surprise!" Weird Science and Blade Runner 2049...)
It also strikes me that Morpheus, as well as being the name of the god of dreams whose stories should on no account be believed, rhymes with 'Orpheus'. But I don't know where to go with that!
There's much more to be said about slavery (I've added a bit, to the original post) but you're right. And infans is fascinating: the dyad in "Star Wars" is one fey gold robot who can speak literally a million languages, and one trundling pedal-bin whose only language is, literally, beep-beep-boop.