On what it means to be human… or android…

My Science Fiction module is in full swing again and next week the students and I will be discussing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (1968). The novel is known to many as the story upon which Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie, Blade Runner, was based, and it is difficult not to picture Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard when rereading it now. There are some key differences between the book and the film: Scott replaces the arid dust of the novel with endless rain; the afflicted J. F. Sebastian is a very different character to Dick’s damaged John Isidore; the movie contains no trace of the quasi-religious Mercerism that controls the remaining inhabitants of a doomed earth; and animals, either real or electric, don’t play much of a part in Scott’s interpretation.

Dick’s Rick Deckard, like all the ‘human’ inhabitants of post-apocalyptic San Francisco, is obsessed with owning a real animal, instead of the second-class electric sheep that he keeps on the top of his apartment building. Real animals are very rare and super-expensive. Rick’s job is to ‘retire’ rogue Androids that have escaped from the human colony on Mars where they are enslaved. If he can get enough of them, the bounty will pay for a real animal, a surprise for his wife. Luckily for him, a group of very advanced Nexus-6 Androids are on the run.

One question at the heart of this novel is what does it mean to be human? Nexus-6 Androids are so advanced it is impossible to identify them without the bespoke Voight-Kampff Empathy test. The ability to empathise is cast as the ultimate human trope. This is never more movingly explored than in the chapter when John Isidore watches as Pris, an Android, snip the legs from a real spider, one by one. Her mutilation of the spider, no more than an objective experiment for her, causes John Isidore, and the reader, significant distress. Isidore is considered a ‘special’ because his generic make-up has been altered by the devastation to the planet. But even he is more human than his manufactured friends because he can relate to the spider. It is very difficult to identify Androids, but their failure to empathise reveals them in the end.

All this taps into current debates about the uses and dangers of AI that are becoming more and more prevalent in our own society. Dick’s Androids are fully sentient beings; they can think and to some extent feel as humans do. They replicate humanity very efficiently. But the remnants of humanity that inhabit Dick’s San Francisco are also deficient in many ways, clinging to Mercerism and dependent on their ‘empathy boxes’ and their ‘mood organs’, mechanisms for telling them what to think and feel. As Deckard becomes more involved with the Androids he hunts, he too begins to question what it means to be human and simultaneously, the reader questions him. How can we tell the difference? What happens to society when the non-human has the capacity to overtake the human? Science fiction in 1968, but is it reality now?