The book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the 1982 movie, Blade Runner and its 2017 sequel, Blade Runner: 2049. The book is about a future bounty hunter whose job is to hunt down rogue androids and kill them. Given the current advancements of AI, this is a relevant story about robots as life forms with themes that have continued to be developed since then in movies like A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001 and in 2025, The Electric State. Philip K. Dick writes an excellent science fiction that raises the What if’s of creating robots (AI?!) that look more and more like humans.
In Philip K. Dick’s story, the key point about the artificially intelligent androids is they lack empathy, which is how they are caught because it differentiates them from humans. These robots are convincing as humans, and when bounty hunters find themselves in a relationship with one, it then becomes a challenge to kill it. Today, people are developing relationships with AI chatboxes, which makes this more than a possibility! This science fiction story may become merely a detective story if the “What if” becomes our reality. The question this poses is this: In the book, robots do not have the rights of humans and can be killed upon being discovered in a place that they aren’t supposed to be, or doing something they aren’t supposed to be doing, as if they were nothing more than an old laptop being thrown out; but will there be a point when these “robots” are human enough to warrant rights?
To explore this question, Dick creates a comparison to pets, which could be any animal in this future, not just a dog or a cat. This is interesting because animals do not have empathy for us, but we imagine them having the same level of humanity that we do, especially when it comes to dogs. In the story, people prefer a live animal over a robot one, and having a live pet becomes a status symbol. The Bodyguard Manual notes that many communities will have a greater uproar over the death of an animal than a human. This comparison of how we treat people, animals, and human-adjacent AI robots puts into question our perception of empathy. Does empathy matter?
Dick’s story also has a religion whose god is Mercer which becomes another play on empathy. People relate to Mercer through an “empathy box” that allows humans to feel a painful experience with Mercer, an experience androids are unable to have. For me, this brings up the question of whether AI will ever have that extra something, the “soul,” which sets humanity apart from animals, a something we have a hard time defining. If something lacks empathy, or a soul, is it ok to kill it indiscriminately, as we would an ant or a fly? Is religion merely our attempt to understand our empathy, or soul? I won’t spoil the end result of Mercerism, but Dick makes a clear statement about religion with it.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is distinct from the two movies I cited above in that androids do not have empathy. Dick makes it clear that androids do not care about human life or even the lives of other androids, but the more modern stories tend to show artificially intelligent robots as if they have a soul, giving them equal standing with humans, if not more standing as they supersede us. This seems to reflect a social and political shift in America, if not the world, as we become more accepting of different lifestyles and perspectives. I’m curious how modern readers would take to Dick’s androids, and I’ll probably have to watch the movie Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner: 2049 to see how others have taken his story and updated it. Reading this book is refreshing, entertaining, and enlightening. If you enjoy a good story, it works, and if you enjoy a thoughtful sci-fi, it does well.
Check out my article on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, another great sci-fi relevant to today’s AI issues.