I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Android Empathy

308 Android Empathy No engineer or chemist claims to be able to produce a material which is indistinguishable from the human skin. It is possible that at some time this might be done, but even supposing this invention available we should feel there was little point in trying to make a “thinking machine” more human by dressing it up in such artificial flesh. —a. m. turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” And Harrison Ford would say, “Lower that blast-pistol or you’re a dead android!” And I would just leap across that special effects set like a veritable gazelle and seize him by the throat and start battering him against the wall. They’d have to run in and throw a blanket over me and call the security guards to bring in the Thorazine . And I’d be screaming, “You’ve destroyed my book!” . . . They’d have to ship me back to Orange County in a crate full of air holes. And I’d still be screaming. . . . “Hollywood is gonna kill me by remote control!” —philip k. dick in Boonstra, “A Final Interview with Science Fiction’s Boldest Visionary” When Deckard busts an android network he senses that he, as the Form Destroyer, is impinging on a microcosm of life. Thus he rises to the occasion as overseer and death driver while the androids are miniaturized, in a sense, inside their representation of world or life. Truth be told, Deckard doesn’t know the half of the ubiquity of androids crowding the passing lane on Earth. It would appear that most people in the android-making and the media entertainment industries are androids. This is where Blade Runner fits right in. Android Empathy 309 That the distinction between humans and androids, between empathy and psychopathy, traverses every human psyche is given in the opening scene of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which like an overture seems to contain all the novel’s themes but set on a couple in need of counseling. Three gadgets dominate the couple’s household or economy. In addition to the competing TV set and empathy box there is also the Pen- field mood organ, which Rick Deckard likes to rely on as much as his wife Iran seeks to undermine it. In turn he tends to avoid the empathy box that she prizes above all. Like the television, the mood organ is a media device used both by humans and androids, often as weapons in their holy war. Iran’s mistrust of the mood organ leads her to readjust it, via a series of trials, as extension of the depressive tendencies it was designed to cloak. “At that moment . . . when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” (5) Deckard warns her that it is “‘dangerous to undergo a depression, any kind’” (6). By the end of the novel, however, he will join her sensibility in which there was already that empathy for the hunted androids or andys, which he would add to the sensorium of testing. His wife Iran at the start of the novel accuses him of being a hired killer. When he protests that he has never killed a human being, she gets to the point way ahead of the novel’s second thoughts: “Just those poor andys” (4). When Deckard phones her later that day but cannot penetrate the depression she redialed after he left, he tips off his projected identification of her android nature, which, again by the end of the novel, he must reclaim and work through as his own. “For all intents he spoke into a vacuum. . . . I wish I had gotten rid of her two years ago when we were considering splitting up. I can still do it, he reminded himself” (94). She openly embraces the status of blow-up dolly to...