Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!
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What Hacker News says
- There are huge advantages to AI-moderation. TBD what the unintended consequences are. But I think it's worth trying.
I believe banning AI is a temporary solution. Even today it is very hard to tell human from AI. In the future it will be impossible. We are in the Philip Dick future of "Do Androids Dream" (the book, not the movie). Does it matter if we can't tell human from AI? The book proposes that how we feel about the piece we're reading is the only thing that matter. How the piece got created is irrelevant.
- Just read Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep, I’d highly recommend it. It’s quite different than Blade Runner. It leans much heavier into these kinds of themes, there’s a whole sort of religion about caring for animals and cultivating human empathy.
- Looking at this thread, it's pretty obvious that most folks here haven't really given any thought as to the nature of consciousness. There are people who are thinking, really thinking about what it means to be conscious.
Thought experiment - if you create an indistinguishable replica of yourself, atom-by-atom, is the replica alive? I reckon if you met it, you'd think it was. If you put your replica behind a keyboard, would it still be alive? Now what if you just took the neural net and modeled it?
Being personally annoyed at a feature is fine. Worrying about how it might be used in the future is fine. But before you disregard the idea of conscious machines wholesale, there's a lot of really great reading you can do that might spark some curiosity.
this gets explored in fiction like 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and my personal favorite short story on this matter by Stanislaw Lem [0]. If you want to read more musings on the nature of consciousness, I recommend the compilation put together by Dennet and Hofstader[1]. If you've never wondered about where the seat of consciousness is, give it a try.
Thought experiment: if your brain is in a vat, but connected to your body by lossless radio link, where does it feel like your consciousness is? What happens when you stand next to the vat and see your own brain? What about when the radio link fails suddenly fails and you're now just a brain in a vat?
[0] The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html (this is a 5 minute read, and fun, to boot).
[1] The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul. Douglas R Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett.
- On this note, I'd like to recommend Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which goes beyond the what was adapted in "Blade Runner" on many fronts, but particularly in regards to what it feels like to own a robotic animal (or a flesh one for that matter).
- That was similar to my experience too. I discovered "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in a pop-science magazine article about science fiction novels in the nineties, along with Foundation. Both titles resonated with me and ignited my imagination. Years later, I was finally able to read both and was amazed.
- A title doesn’t have to do anything other than draw the reader’s attention to the work. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is, IMO a great title — and it does relate to the humanity of the androids.
It’s a far superior title compared to “Blade Runner,” which is actually better than the book.
Anyway, I’d say that the fact we’re still talking about his work nearly 50 years after his death suggests he might not have sucked at titles…
