“You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity.”

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who makes his living helping the authorities catch illegal androids – dead rather than alive – hiding on Earth. Tired of his job, his marriage, and having to deal with a fake electronic sheep and synthetic fibers to save face in front of his neighbors, he decides to accept one last contract, the money raised to buy a real sheep in the flesh. For better or for worse, this last deal will be the one of a lifetime.

In the Twilight of Humanity

In this devastated world, one tries to forget the emptiness of one’s existence. The television is constantly playing and, watching the variety show of friend Buster – inexhaustible and yet never boring – people do not seem inclined to other entertainments except to take care of a pet. This still resonates without a doubt with our contemporary world, as we binge watch Netflix or TOU.tv series one after the other without ever stopping except to feed the kitten. Strangely, in reality too, there seems to be no end to the new content we could watch.

What is it to be human and what does it mean to embody this creature as unique as it is enigmatic? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? introduces the reader to a dystopia where human beings are prisoners of their freedom. Androids usually do the work of terraforming planets so that rich space colonists can live it up. On Earth, living conditions – as pitiful as they may be – offer plenty of comfort to anyone who can afford to get a Penfield Mood-Organ, an abstract electronic contraption that allows its owner to control their emotions at will. If you want to be grumpy or friendly, excited or sad, you just have to dial it in with a number code.

More than human

Human empathy is the only thing that separates humans from the machines that surround them, but it is this latter that is gradually disintegrating as androids become so sophisticated that they seem more alive than simply mobile. Rick Deckard is one of the last to still use his emotions and instincts to achieve his ends. After all, work obliges since the task of a Blade Runner is to find and eliminate any android that would be found on Earth. With a license to “kill” on sight any entity judged to be a machine imitating humans.

This is where things get complicated. Nexus 6 androids are ultra-efficient and ultra-intelligent to the point where each of them – in the space of a few years – is capable of developing a complex personality similar in every way to that of a human being. Rick begins to doubt his ability to discern man from machine, especially when his partner Phil Resch is deemed sociopathic, but not an android; further blurring the line between human logic and artificial intelligence.

Being human

Love and affection are also themes addressed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which turns out to be a title that rolls off the tongue with difficulty, but how pleasantly in the head. If an android wants to protect us, body and soul against all peril, if a human is ready to protect this machine in the same way in return, is it mutual affection, love? Even if we can get rid of it, would we prefer to join it? Haven’t we become experts in the art of creating electronic and vibrating phalluses as well as self-lubricating and self-cleaning fake vaginas; aren’t we developing increasingly sophisticated interfaces that make us forget the difference between consciousness and program? 

Philip K. Dick still redefines today what our existence represents; this passage on earth in this fleshy envelope that we call evolved and at the cutting edge of the bioengineering of the universe. Rick Deckard will have to go through a difficult introspective process in order to find the part of humanity that still separates man – or woman – from the machine and, metaphorically, the true from the false. What will be the next step of Homo sapiens in the history of the universe? Will we continue this mad race to want and to discover more and more novelty while each time reinforcing the walls that we erect around our heart? In the end, is it not ironic that humanity constantly wants to improve the “quality of life” of its electronic devices for the benefit of the organic? Time is the only thing that would keep us away from the inevitable encounter with our own reflection; this ingenious mirror that – we hope – will be able to give us another look at ourselves and get us out of trouble.

Adapted to the cinema in a film directed by Ridley Scott entitled Blade Runner.