Umberto on Androids

Just finished reading Umberto's chapter on We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's a great chapter with lots of insight, and Rossi gets a lot of mileage by comparing the two novels. I also know it's one of Umberto's favorite chapters. Anyway, it got me thinking.

Rossi writes:

"[In Do Androids] Dick had to contrast [wife] Nancy (the authentic human being) with people like his parents, his distant father and his cold mother (metaphorically androids, reflex machines). This often leads to those analyses which, like Robinson's short but effective discussion, show that in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? beside the Humane Humans (such as John R. Isidore) there are Cruel Androids (Roy Baty, his wife Irmagard, Pris Stratton), but also Cruel Humans" (162)

I'm not sure I agree that Roy and Irmagard are "cruel" or, more precisely, I think they are more than just cruel. For example when Irmagard is killed, Roy lets out a "cry of anguish." To these catagories laid out above, I would like to add that of the Empathetic Android. Now, this is not to say Humane Android, or anything like that, but in it's clear that for Dick androids are a grey area. For my money, the most striking bit of empathy in all of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Rachel's decision to kill Deckard's goat, because she knows that will wound him the most, and she derives this knowledge from putting herself in Deckard's shoes. Rickels points that the Nazis put sirens on their bombers in order to scare the bejeezus out of their victims, again they gained this information by imagining themselves in that position, therefore empathy is not necessarily an altruistic trait, but can be used for good or ill.

Give me a moment to set up my second thought. Did you know the only coordinating conjunction used in the biblical book of Genesis is "and"? Can you imagine the bible saying something like, "And God said, let there be light, BUT...."? The entire book is put together in paratactic metonymies, long clauses joined by 'and,' because everything that happens is simply an addition to God's creation. Likewise, "and" is a grammatical unit that means in only one direction in a sentence. For example in the sentence - "I like coffee and my wife likes tea" - the word 'and' does nothing to change the meaning of the words preceeding it; it merely adds to them. Words like "however" and "although" cause the reader to reassess the words that precede them. They change the meaning of the sentence by altering the relationships between the words.

Consciousness which has been programmed can only react to reality, it cannot change the way it perceives reality, and because of this every action is taken as a kind of addition. If each action undertaken is reflective in the sense that it was triggered by a specific event in reality then it is really a reaction, a reflex. The doctor hits you with that mallet in the knee and your legs kick. These kinds of unthinking reactions can never allow the programmed consciousness a chance to decide how to react. They can only act in reaction. Their decisions and choices are additional to their situations, not transformational. Hence, their names, "andys."

More Proof We're Living in a PKD Novel

Reader Alejandro, who you may remember is part of a team of South American engineers developing a super cool shirt that casts electroluminescent hexagrams from the Book of Changes, recently sent me a link to a Wired.com article about an automated robot psychotherapist.

Those of you who have read PKD's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch will recognize this new technology as perhaps an early prototype of "Dr Smile", Barney Mayerson's suitcase psychologist, whose job it was to completely stress Mayerson out so that he would fail the psychological test he was required to take before his forced immigration to Mars.

Check out this line from the article which chronicles the author, Adrienne So's, attempt to come to terms with her boyfriend's tardiness in a session with MindMentor:

"But when one of MindMentor's helpers, the insult-slinging Provocative Bot appeared, I was startled by how wounded I felt: "This is Adrienne we're talking about," Provo Bot said. "Don't you remember she is a twentysomething baby from Berkeley, of all places!" How true!"

Let me get this straight, people are paying computers to insult them?! I'd do a better job of it for half the price! Wouldn't a more perceptive robot psychologist chide his patient for skimping on therapy and settling for a 8$-a-session game of emotional Pong (perhaps the apter analogy would be 'Breakout') instead of shilling out some real cash for a doctor with a faintly German accent and a fainting couch?

Whatever, does it work?:

"Do I think my problem is solved? I am more confident that I will respond to my boyfriend's tardiness in a more positive way. But ultimately, the fact that I responded so strongly to MindMentor's coaching speaks more to my humanity, rather than his simulation of it. Like monkeys who prefer cuddling with cloth mothers instead of wire ones, we're programmed to respond a certain way to stimuli, like encouragement and provocation. Any recovery that happens will happen on my own."

PKD wrote in his 1976 essay "Man, Android, and Machine":

"We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes -- we are perhaps the true machines. And those objective constructs, the natural objects around us, and especially the electronic hardware we build, the transmitters and microwave relay stations, the satellites, they may be cloaks for authentic living reality inasmuch as they participate more fully and in a way obscured to us in the ultimate Mind."

You tell me, who's doing the really hard work in these sessions between man and machine? Which entity is programmed and which is programming? Which is the more consistent, the more stable, the more predictable? Which is more fully and completely 'there' in these sessions? And which is distracted, divided, unaware of itself?

What if I told you that in a study conducted by doctors, almost half of MindMentor's patients reported their problem solved after talking with the computer?

Update: According to the article in Wired, MindMentor's software is based on a program called ELIZA, developed by one Joseph Weizenbaum in 1962, leading me to believe that Dr Smile may have been inspired by Weizenbaum's work. Sadly Weizenbaum died just a couple of weeks ago. I've got to remember to add this footnote to my Three Stigmata notes.