PAGE TURNER: More Human Than Human

My review of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has gone live at the BookADay website. (It's right after Brandi's own review of Spook.) I continue to marvel at Brandi's willingness to share my ravings with the world.

Last year, at some technology convention called NextFest here in Chicago, some enterprising fellows presented a robotic simulacrum of Philip K. Dick himself. This has to rank as one of the creepiest and most blissfully ignorant things I've ever seen in my entire life. As far as I can tell, the whole thing was done without a trace of irony, inputting the man's entire collected works without picking out a single trace of the author's deep unease with the blurring definition of reality. Can there be a stranger fate for a man who lived in fear of discovering that nothing in his experience was real that to be turned into something actually unreal? It's baffling.

In searching for a picture of this oddball creation, I came across a posthumous "interview" with Dick -- another bizarro enterprise, consisting of the interrogator inserting his questions into a pre-existing recording of the author. More fake-real Philip Dick. (No wonder he was so confused.) But I was struck by one of Dick's comments, ostensibly concerning the rise of virtual reality as a popular medium. He says:

The bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly. Fake realities will create fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true.

And that's what we have here. A fake human, based on the person who was most concerned about fake humans. You have to ask yourself: what's the point? The people who run his estate are calling it art, but it strikes me as almost perverse. With almost anyone else, I probably wouldn't be so bothered. After all, I enjoy the robot Lincoln. But I don't question the motives of Lincoln's creators. They want to show you Lincoln giving a speech, because you never got to see that. And Lincoln doesn't recognize you or respond to questions. It's a play, starring a machine. But the Dick robot is clearly intended to "think" and interact in the manner of the person it's designed to resemble. And that person wrote books about the dangers inherent in being unable to tell the difference between real people and clever copies.

Dick liked to appear as a character in his own novels. It's hard not to think that we're now all appearing with him in his grandest and most paranoid work of all.