Androids 'n' them

Stories about artificial intelligence nearly always seem to be, in the end, stories about what it means to be human. In the works discussed here--the films Blade Runner, Bicentennial Man, and 2001: A Space Odyssey and the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep--this is accomplished in different ways and the focus in each work differs somewhat. But the essence, or the distinguishing traits, of humanity is the theme in all of them. The thrust of such works seems to imply that the characteristics of human behavior that have been valued most highly by Western civilization since the Enlightenment are not the essential core of human-ness. Instead they argue, more or less, that whatever can be replicated by human beings in creatures of their own making (i.e., human appearance or logic) or even improved upon (i.e., with perfectly dispassionate reason, near infallibility, near invulnerability, or physical near-perfection) is only a small part of what makes people human. If it can be reproduced it does not approach the essence of humanity--the things that distinguish human beings from even the most sophisticated machines. But each of these works also draws other inferences from the comparison of human beings and their mechanical counterparts. Bicentennial Man, for example, argues that once all the other elements of humanity are present they will combine to produce the traits that could not simply be manufactured. Dick's novel, on the other hand, deals with the important que

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different--and their stories are completely opposed on the point of whether a machine can become human--they both posit the essence of humanity as its relationship to something beyond what can be readily apprehended in the world. Bicentennial Man suggests, however vaguely, that the accumulation of human traits grows exponentially and opens the way to full human status. Andrew only achieves this, however, by means of his intense communication with human beings and this film's notion of human-ness is richer for its addition of the essentials of human communication in the form of love. Love is first given to Andrew by the child "Little Miss" just as HAL's pride and subsequent emotions were given to him by his makers. But, unlike HAL, Andrew also becomes capable of receiving from others on an emotional-spiritual plane and from Portia he acquires the sense of why human mortality is desirable. Andrew transcends his machine origins in rejecting immortality because he comes to understand that even though it is the rationally preferable alternative there is something beyond the merely rational that calls to genuine human beings. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? offers an even more complex investigation into what it means

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