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HOMEWORK:
• Using the Discussion Board function on Blackboard,
write a detailed paragraph (approximately 250-300
words) on what you feel are the greatest
possibilities, both good and bad, of the future of
technology as it pertains to androids and
artificial intelligence.
• MUST be completed BEFORE the beginning of class
tomorrow.
TASK #1
• Each of you will be assigned a fellow students’
paragraph to respond to
• Your response should not be a reiteration of your
own post. Examine the claims made in the post you
are reading and respond to those.
• Your response should have at least 2 quotes and be
approximately 150 words.
Let’s discuss . . .
• Now that you’ve had the opportunity to process your
thoughts on this issue and examine a different
perspective:
What do you feel are the greatest possibilities,
both good and bad, of the future of technology
as it pertains to androids and artificial
intelligence?
Philip K. Dick’s
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968)
Welcome to the Future of 1992
Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982
• American writer
• Briefly a school classmate of Ursula K. Le Guin
• Wrote 36 novels and 5 books of short stories between 1952
and 1982
• Mental disturbances, incl. dreams and hallucinations,
influenced his fiction; also religious and philosophical
works he read
• Has had at least 9 films based on his works, with more to
come, but none was released within his lifetime
• An award for the best SF paperback book of the year is named
after him
P.K. Dick on His Writing, 1978:
"Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn't go away."
Dick on His Writing, 1978:
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because
unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities
manufactured by very sophisticated people using very
sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not
distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They
have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power:
that of creating whole universes, universes of the
mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
Dick on His Writing, 1978:
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of
one novel after another. And I have to build them in
such a way that they do not fall apart two days
later. Or at least that is what my editors hope.
However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to
build universes which do fall apart. I like to see
them come unglued, and I like to see how the
characters in the novels cope with this problem. I
have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of
it.
Dick on His Writing, 1978:
Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say
this—do not assume that order and stability are
always good, in a society or in a universe. The old,
the ossified, must always give way to new life and
the birth of new things. Before the new things can
be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous
realization, because it tells us that we must
eventually part with much of what is familiar to us.
And that hurts. But that is part of the script of
life.
Dick on His Writing, 1978:
Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we
ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying
is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life
must perish so that the authentic human being can
live. And it is the authentic human being who
matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can
bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Weltansicht (n)German
The general attitude toward life and reality that an
individual character demonstrates
What is the Weltansicht of Philip K. Dick?
Jean Baudrillard on Dick:
• "It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is
something altogether different. And this is so not because
Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done
so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial
replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the
double has disappeared. There is no more double; one is
always already in the other world, an other world which is
not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as
means for reflection. The simulation is impassable,
unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no
longer move "through the mirror" to the other side, as we
could during the golden age of transcendence."
Philip K. Dick and New Wave
• Dick’s writing is a reply to, and also parody of,
SF literary conventions and sociopolitical concerns
• He uses a future possible world to ask questions
about the actual world
• He comes from a view of late-1960s America as “a
time when...we had become as bad as the enemy”
Philip K. Dick and Cyberpunk
• What makes it cyberpunk?
• Dark, film-noir-influenced imagery, especially in
the film version
• Relationship of humans to technology
• Portrays an individual, anti-heroic character in
opposition to a shadowy corporate power
Androids
• “android is a metaphor
for people who are
physiologically human but
behaving in a nonhuman
way”
• “I’ve never killed a
human being
before....Just those poor
andys”
Empathy and Artificial Intelligence
• Voight-Kampff Empathy Test as parody of the Turing Test
for AI
• The Turing Test:
“a human judge engages in a natural language
conversation with one human and one machine, each of
which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably
tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass
the test. In order to keep the test setting simple and
universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability
of the machine instead of its ability to render words
into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a
text-only channel.”
The Voight-Kampff test as described in the
original screenplay of Blade Runner:
"A very advanced form of lie detector that measures
contractions of the iris muscle and the presence of
invisible airborne particles emitted from the body.
The bellows were designed for the latter function and
give the machine the menacing air of a sinister
insect. The VK is used primarily by Blade Runners to
determine if a suspect is truly human by measuring the
degree of his empathic response through carefully
worded questions and statements."
Human/Android Connections
• “the Voight-Kampff scale applied to a
carefully select group of schizoid and
schizophrenic human patients” (ref. to Dick’s
own mental instability?)
• “Two parallel police agencies...ours and this
one” - destabilization of reality
• Which is superior, and for what reasons?
• Androids with feelings? Humans without
empathy?
• Love/sexual attraction between humans and
androids, or between androids
• Is Deckard an android too?
Conflict in the text
• “You shall kill only the killers”
• “Do you think of them as ‘it’?...When my conscience
occasionally bothered me about the work I had to
do; I protected myself by thinking of them that
way, but now I no longer find it necessary”
• “Do you think androids have souls?”
• “Do androids dream?...Evidently; that’s why they
occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A
better life, without servitude”
Empathy, Emotions, and Technology
• Mood organs used to produce artificial emotional
stimulation, in oneself or others, at will: “My
schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory
depression”
• Empathy boxes, Mercerism, and Buster Friendly: new
religion based on empathy and restoration of life
• “an empathy box...is the most personal possession
you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the
way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop
being alone”
Animals, Real and Replicant
• Signs of life in a decaying world
• Animals as commodity and status symbol: prestige
based on rarity and on ‘reality’ – “She doesn’t
care if we own an ostrich or not”
• Voight-Kampff questions about animals vs. about
humans
• Replicant animals require as much care as real
ones, but are not as highly prized
• “The electric things have their lives too. Paltry
as those lives are”
Specials
• Similarities between ‘specials’ and ‘other’ humans
(humans who stay on Earth - physiological or
psychological reasons?)
• Similarities between ‘specials’ and androids (Baty
and Pris with Isidore)
• Similarities between ‘specials’ and animals
(“chickenheads”, etc.)
Corporate and Consumer Culture
• Animals and androids as commodities
• “The silence of the world could not rein back its
greed”
• “We produced what the colonists wanted... We
followed the time-honored principle underlying
every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made
these progressively human types, other firms in the
field would have”
HOMEWORK:
Read and take notes on Chapter 1 of
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
(It’s only 6 pages, so please do it so
tomorrow’s class makes sense to you.)