Initially set in 1992, later editions of the science fiction classic “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” updated the setting to 2021. And so, we have now lived through Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel.
Perhaps best known as inspiring the 1982 Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner, the novel won mixed reviews at launch but has developed a cult following. Dick (1928-1982) is not remembered as a great writer as much as a great thinker (Minority Report and Total Recall also inspired by his stories), and that’s felt truer still after a new wave of artificial intelligence hype.
The title plays off a subplot of the book in which the humans who remain on earth (after nuclear fallout) covet the status symbol of a living animal, as opposed to artificial ones. So, the question is whether androids (the increasingly human-passing machines that the main character is chasing) would dream of electric ones? Its big theme: What defines humanity, especially if machines increasingly recreate many of the skills we identify with? I enjoyed the book, and below share notes for my own future reference.
My notes:
- “I’ll dial for what I’m supposed to feel.”
- “Penfield mood organ,”
- Rand Corporation tho
- “An android […] doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for.”
- “Do you think androids have souls?”
- “The silence of the world could not rein back its cry of need.”
- “The silence of absence remained.”
- “You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all.”
- “You’re not human; no more than I am— you’re an android, too!”
- “Do you think there’s a difference? Is it better to be a human murderer than an android?”
- How do we reconcile moral failure in humans with the expectation that machines be “better” than us?
- “You have to be merciful sometimes.”
- “She’s really alive, he thought. Not like a false animal or a phony human.”
- Can a fake thing make you feel something real?
- “Androids can’t love. I said that already.”
- Is love a uniquely human experience, or can it be replicated and manipulated by machines?
- “The old man stumbles; falls. He keeps going.”
- What is the responsibility for maintaining another life? When does it cross over from human to any other being?
- “He looked at her and saw himself.”
- “The electric things have their lives too. Paltry as those lives are.”