2025-02-16
Androids be us
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick explored the idea that human beings might become androids, beings without empathy, by virtue of too much interaction with automation and artificial intelligence. "A metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way." In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott took the story in the opposite way, by wondering what happens when (artificial) androids develop empathy?
Both are beautiful works of art in their own right, but it seems to me that Dick's fear was much more realistic after all. Indeed, that is precisely the danger Norbert Wiener (whom Dick read) warned us about in his Human Use of Human Beings: "The real danger is that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically".
Both are beautiful works of art in their own right, but it seems to me that Dick's fear was much more realistic after all. Indeed, that is precisely the danger Norbert Wiener (whom Dick read) warned us about in his Human Use of Human Beings: "The real danger is that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically".
Labels: #AI, #Cybernetics, #Film, Androids
