Philip K. Dick's Androids
The blurry line between men and machines
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired the film Blade Runner, a bounty hunter pursues a group of androids who have been posing as human beings. He is eventually arrested and accused of being an android himself. The officers bring him to what turns out to be a counterfeit police station run entirely by androids, not all of whom are aware that they aren't human.
"What do you do," one of the robocops asks him, "roam around killing people and telling yourself they're androids?"
It's a complicated situation. But then, androids play a complicated role in Dick's fiction. On the most obvious level, they represent the inhuman and the mechanical: People have empathy and will, while robots are rigid and soulless. It's a familiar division in science fiction, though some storytellers prefer to put other monsters in the androids' place. Think of the aliens in Don Siegel's movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. "You can't love or be loved! Am I right?" the film's hero asks one of the pod people. "You say it as if it were terrible," comes the reply.
But few things are so simple in a Philip K. Dick story. A recurring moment in Dick's fiction is for a character who thinks he's human to discover he's really a machine. If Dick had written Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the protagonist would probably learn halfway through the picture that he's a pod person who somehow forgot his origins. He doesn't feel like an inhuman menace: He genuinely loves his wife, he remembers the life of the man he replaced, and he doesn't want the world to be overrun by invaders any more than his friends do. Meanwhile, the cold, cruel authority figure that the hero was sure was an alien would turn out to be a regular Earthman who just happens to be a soulless thug. Who's human now?
So Dick's androids have a second role, not as our opposites but as our alter egos. As the author put it in a 1972 speech:
Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-Other, which has come out of a General Electrics factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.
Dick wasn't afraid of our synthetic environment; he saw the possibility of humanity and life there. His fear was focused on a "kind of pseudo-human behavior exhibited by what were once living men." The "production of such inauthentic human activity," he warned in that speech,
has become a science of government and such-like agencies now. The reduction of humans to mere use—men made into machines, serving a purpose which although "good" in an abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal—however puny—destiny.
The deep problem, for Dick, wasn't that mechanisms might become more manlike. It's that men might be reduced to mechanisms.
In 1954, the French sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote The Technological Society, one of those books that manages to be illuminating even though it's deeply wrong. "Wherever a technical factor exists," Ellul argued, "it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: technique transforms everything it touches into a machine." Ellul believed such transformations were spreading across 20th-century society, creating something new and ugly. When "technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance," he wrote. "It is no longer face to face with man but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him."
That's one portrait of our relationship with technology. In 2003, the cognitive scientist Andy Clark offered another. In a wonderful book called Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argued that our brains are special precisely because of "their ability to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids." From cars to cochlear implants, our tools are extensions of our selves, our technology an extension of our humanity. Where Ellul warned that technology was absorbing us, Clark described it radiating from us.
Broadly speaking, I think Clark is right. But history, particularly the most recent century of history, is filled with episodes that look more like Ellul's image, times when powerful institutions have made tools of human beings. That's what a hierarchy is: a system that treats individuals as appendages. In those hierarchies' hands, technology has entrenched centralized power in countless ways, making it easier for institutions to spy, track, coerce, incarcerate, and kill.
It's just that those hierarchies don't have a monopoly on technology. It's in the hands of figures outside those institutions too, and it's in the hands of underlings who don't want to be treated as appendages anymore. Tools can extend or restrict our autonomy, depending on who controls them and how they're used. The result is not the dystopia Ellul predicted—what he called a "monolithic technical world"—but something much more chaotic and interesting.
The prophet of that chaos is Philip K. Dick, the writer who imagined both a man with a pump for a heart and a weeping, bleeding robot. In that same 1972 speech, he offered a prescient vision of a future that is both totalitarian and anarchistic, a world of both universal surveillance from above and casual monkey-wrenching from below. And because Dick was always more likely to give his readers a wry dark comedy than a heroic saga, his human resistance owed as much to our selfishness and stupidity as it did to our love and ingenuity:
The totalitarian society envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 should have arrived by now. The electronic gadgets are here. The government is here, ready to do what Orwell anticipated. So the power exists, the motive, and the electronic hardware. But these mean nothing, because, progressively more and more so, no one is listening. The new youth that I see is too stupid to read, too restless and bored to watch, too preoccupied to remember. The collective voice of the authorities is wasted on him; he rebels. But rebels not out of theoretical, ideological considerations, only out of what might be called pure selfishness. Plus a careless lack of regard for the dread consequences the authorities promise him if he fails to obey. He cannot be bribed because what he wants he can build, steal, or in some curious, intricate way acquire for himself. He cannot be intimidated because on the streets and in his home he has seen and participated in so much violence that it fails to cow him. He merely gets out of its way when it threatens, or, if he can't escape, he fights back. When the locked police van comes to carry him off to the concentration camp the guards will discover that while loading the van they have failed to note that another equally hopeless juvenile has slashed the tires. The van is out of commission. And while the tires are being replaced, the other youth siphons out all the gas from the gas tank for his souped-up Chevrolet Impala and has sped off long ago.
If Dick had lived longer, he might have imagined the delinquent taking off in one of Google's driverless cars instead. But that wouldn't change his point at all. The kid would be riding a robot, but the tool would still be answering to a human being.
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Why the sudden glut of robot articles?
Because Reason ran out of millenial articles?
ANDROID POLL!
Special Reason Robot Issue!
It’s just preparing you for the secret reveal that Obama is a robot.
I love The Simulacra, maybe not as famous as some of his others, but the idea of the president being a never ending succession of interchangeable robots who have no real power, while the real power lies with a celebrity actress and a behind the scenes cabal, seems somehow like a snarky description of the last 30 or 40 years.
Well, Neo had that book on his shelf, so there is that.
He had the binding of the book. It was a slick for hiding his (presumably) illegal software/drugs.
Plans within plans…
Obviously, I need to watch the revelant parts of the movie again.
“Plans within plans…”
I enjoyed the book Dune (“plots within plots”) and reread it every several years.
No. The book Neo had was “Simulcra and Simulation” by french theorist Jean Baudrillard. Also very relevant.
I for one welcome our new robotic Reason editorial overlords.
OK, yes, I agree with you… ONLY if “demobocracy” under our new Overlords, allows us to put it to a VOTE, what we all will have to eat for breakfast tomorrow morning…
The spam problem is going to be atrocious.
Most of Reason’s writers were sleeper Cylons. Now they’ve awakened and are preparing us for the invasion.
Let me be the first to volunteer to intern for number 6.
Let me be the first to volunteer to intern for number 6.
What the hell
Fucking toasters!
… is dangerous and permanently scarring..
There are many copies. Even of your comments.
Don’t you like them, my good chap?
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Reason: “I for one, welcome our Robot over-lords.”
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We only have four years. It might be too late already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpLoDADYF5g
I think one important detail in Sheep is that the android detection test turns out to be an empty lie once it is proven that humans don’t actually possess empathy.
So that society’s crucial distinction between man and machine – seen as so important that it was the standard by which life and death were determined – never really existed.
So, kind of like the polygraph?
Dick’s stories are full of paranoia and replacement fears and the like.
Part of what makes them interesting.
(And part of why Blade Runner, despite being a beautiful film, and a good one on its own, is a pale shadow of Androids.)
(And part of why Blade Runner, despite being a beautiful film, and a good one on its own, is a pale shadow of Androids.)
Even though I’m aware that movies usually take varying amounts of liberties with books, I was still pretty shocked when I finally read the book. Very different.
There hasn’t been a single movie based on a PKD property that wasn’t vastly different than the original.
Probably the closest to the book is ‘through a scanner darkly’.
Screamers
Was very faithful to Second Variety.
The recent Radio Free Albemuth adaptation was pretty loyal to the original novel. The main difference was that they changed the years in which the story was set.
I was impressed with Amazon’s first episode of The Man in the High Castle.
Apparently its been greenlighted for more episodes so fingers crossed.
I was impressed with Amazon’s first episode of The Man in the High Castle.
I had fun watching it, but I wouldn’t call it a faithful adaptation.
Agreed, though I thought substituting news reel footage showing an alternate reality for The Grasshopper Lies Heavy book was an interesting plot change.
Have you read VALIS Jesse? If so, where do you place that in the PKD canon?
I think VALIS is brilliant. I’d put it in the top five.
Concur, though for someone new to PKD it wouldn’t be my first recommendation.
Radio Free Albemuth?
Haven’t seen this yet. Believe its a small budget production.
RFA was published posthumously. It was written prior to VALIS though published after that novel. Think PKD wrote it as some kind of preparation to writing VALIS.
Yes, low budget. And as straight an adaptation of a PKD novel as I can imagine. Strangely, the biggest mindfuck in it I remember is me wondering who is that chick that looks like Alanis Morissette is. Roll credits, yeah, it’s her.
Albemuth was basically the first draft for VALIS. IIRC, the publisher asked for revisions, and was surprised to then receive an almost entirely different novel.
The movie is OK. Some parts of it work really well, but I don’t think the denouement really comes off.
VALIS is a great novel. However VALIS the opera by Todd Machover is to be avoided at all costs!
The same can be said for almost any thoughtful science fiction. Maybe you just can’t dive into the ideas and show some action in a 2 hour film.
I wish HBO would focus itself on a really good sci-fi series like it has on GOT. Larry Niven’s Known Space / Ringworld series could be spectacular.
How far off was Minority Report?
Enjoyed the essay.
Reminds me of the scene at the end of his novel “Now Wait for Last Year”- not usually ranked as among his best but one of my favorites – between Dr Eric Sweetscent and his cab:
Deciding that he is destined to join Ackerman’s resistance against the ‘Starmen, Eric enters an automated cab bound for TF&D, asking it what it would do if its wife suffered from brain-damage without possibility of recovery (which Eric had confirmed by contacting his future self). After pointing out that robots do not marry, the cab hypothetically concludes that it would stay with her. Life, argues the cab, is made up of a series of circumstances, different for each person. To leave one’s wife would be to say that he requires a uniquely easier set of circumstances than what has been provided. That reasoning, to the cab, was an irrational way of thinking.
Eric agrees and decides to stay with his wife despite the challenges presented by her condition, and in the closing paragraph he is thereby commended by the cab for being a ‘good man’.
Sounds like Panglossian logic to me.
I came to a different conclusion. I took the cab’s viewpoint to be critical of the man desiring an unrealistic set of circumstances simply because the man didn’t like the reality which he is experiencing.
I didn’t get the impression that the cab concluded that the man’s reality was the best/most optimistic set of circumstances he could possibly experience.
“What you want is not what you have and that is not rational” versus “Your life is great.”
Regardless, the text ubik quoted for us has given me another book to read.
I hope you check NWFLY out Charles. The plot is crazy complex and I think its one among a batch of novels that PKD wrote very quickly in the 1960s. Its not normally listed as among his best but I really enjoyed it, in fact have read it at least a couple times.
Something not normally mentioned about PKD… he’s one of the funniest writers I’ve ever encountered, though the humor is usually of the blackest variety. From the various documentaries about him and his friends he was very funny and had a razor sharp wit in real life as well.
I like Now Wait for Last Year too. One of the better science-fictional responses to the Vietnam War.
Interesting, never really caught that angle Jesse! Maybe because I grew up in the UK where I first read the novel before hopping the Atlantic to live here.
Now you’ve encouraged me to add two books to my seemingly ever expanding list of books to read.
“The plot is crazy complex….”
Yes, go on.
“… one of the funniest writers I’ve ever encountered, though the humor is usually of the blackest variety.”
Done.
If you want to see PKD in drop down dead funny mode check out “Clans of the Alphane Moon.
Has one of my favorite aliens in all of SF…Lord Running Clam, the telepathic Ganymedean slime mold.
There’s a great scene in the novel where one of the main characters is about to commit suicide in a hotel because his wife’s left him and Lord Running Clam starts oozing under the door at the same time as the character hears a voice inside his head imploring him to not kill himself whilst apologizing for eavesdropping on his thoughts. Classic PKD.
The deep problem, for Dick, wasn’t that mechanisms might become more manlike. It’s that men might be reduced to mechanisms.”
What we need is a lot of rules and regulations on corporations to prevent that from happening! /deep derp
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Can I recommend Stansilaw Lem to Mr. Walker? He was one of the few sci-fi novelists PKD could stand and The Futurological Congress especially has some themes that may resonate with some of the ideas around here.
Scratch that, Dick hated him too. Is there anyone that guy liked?
Jeter, Powers and Blaylock were all personal friends.
Scratch that, Dick hated him too.
Indeed. Dick infamously wrote this about Lem.
But I agree that Lem is great. I haven’t read The Futurological Congress but I love The Cyberiad.
The Futurological Congress
I’ll second the recommendation- it’s fantastic, as Lem tends to be.
He was a huge admirer of Heinlein. In volume 2 of the Patterson bio, there is an excerpt from a letter from PKD to Heinlein that borders on worship. When Heinlein later met PKD at a con, Heinlein brought several PKD books to get autographed.
You know who failed the Voight-Kampff test?
Charles Dickens?
Studio executives?
Me?
Voight AND Kampff?
Michael Bay?
… but the tool would still be answering to a human being.
I was recently thinking the exact same thing. I love technology and honestly wish I could reincarnate in a hundred years (if only for a week or two) to see firsthand how much we’ve advanced.
As long as technology answers to us and not us to technology– our lives look better all the time.
I feel safe enough with the Reason crowd now to admit that I am a fan of the Berserker stories/novels by Saberhagen. There are some Libertarian themes therein, and some stuff GKC would like too.
Sigh. Might have to download the old novels to my kindle and see if they have stood the test of 25 years since I last read them.
I am sick of Philip K Dick.
Why is this guy the font of sf moviedom? Why do we endlessly wallow in his schizophrenic dystopian black comedies?
We could be exploring Known Space with Louis Wu, riding a Titanide with the Wizard, or watching Lazarus Long having sex with not one, but two female versions of himself.
There are so many great sf authors.
And we get dick.
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Super powerful, rare earth, magnetic rods for you to play with.
Make sculptures, puzzles, patterns, shapes, jewelry . . . the joy is endless.
Totally compatible with all other BuckyBall sets!
Each set comes with a little carrying case too.
each BuckyBall is 5mm in diameter
cube: 1 ?” high x 1 ?” wide x 1 ?” diameter
For adults only. ? These are so super strong, they should be kept away from children.
Um…10 day old post promoted?
More like 22!
Oh man…I read the comments as “3/15” – this is worse than I thought! I guess it is rerun season now?
He said “dick”! huh huh – huh huh – huh huh – huh huh- uhhhhh – huh huh…
Who doesn’t like Dick? *looks nervously around*
Give us a heads up when you have spotted Dick.
Here, have a hard roll…if you are partial to English cuisine that is.
reading SF should not be like some 3rd year (HS or college) home work assignment…fucking intellectual posers. You want a headache read fucking Joyce.
Aynrandroid!!
Nice.
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