From All Over the Internetz...

Pictured: Matt Damon, in what appears to be a non-dodgy chair, in The Adjustment Bureau...

Here I am again, with just enough time for a quick stroll through the weird world of Dickian effluvia. The Philip K Dick Article Machine can be heard chug-chugging to life amid the dying wreckage of print journalism as the world prepares for yet another PKD adaptation to hit the screen this Friday - which is no good for me because I've got a thing that night. Saturday too. Maybe I could do a midnight show on Friday, but so far it's not looking like it's gonna be a whole lotta theaters. Maybe a Sunday matinee? Any Bay Area Dick-heads up for something like this?

As promised is a quick tour of the PKD article machine's latest sputterings:

My least favorite (that's the polite way of saying it's the worst right?) of the pile was this Washington Post article written by the mysterious Beale... This article's greatest sin is that it's just long enough to include all of the information previously written about Philip K Dick in similar articles. Paranoid? Check. Drug-addled? Check. Bad writer? Check. I have to admit that's the one that gets me. Isn't it kind of like talking about a terrific painter is no good with paints? Cuz that's one of those self-negating statements Horselover liked so much...

1) God does not exist
2) And anyhow he's stupid.

On the plus side, this article has got quotes from a wide variety of sources. I'm not sure if I think more or less of them for not consulting me...

The most annoying thing is that they don't mention Radio Free Albemuth while listing all the upcoming PKD adaptations. Write a little something (keep it respectable) in the comments section, let's see if we can get them to take notice...

I guess that's the only PKD machine article, now that I think about it...

There's this temporal lobe epilepsy article that mentions PKD (hat-tip to Frank Bertrand)

A reader emails: "if you want to see the Philip K. Dick robot in action, this week's ep of Nova ScienceNOW called "What's the next big thing?" has a segment on it. I don't pretend to understand PBS scheduling, but in my neck of the woods (Vancouver), it's on again on Friday and on Sunday." er, uh, sorry, that might be last week, but nothing digital ever really dies so if you find it, point us to it in the comments section please.

PKD Otaku number 21 (!) is now available here. Of course it's chock full of the good PKD-stuff!

We Can Re-Build You

Snapped from the Interaether by devoted Dick-head Laura, this twitpic, captioned "Phil hanging out, having a chat," was posted on January 5th 2011 by @hansonrobotics, an outfit that most recently made headlines when they misplaced the head of the their last PKD-bot on a transcontinental flight (Hanson Robotics subsequently sued the airlines and lost).

So, new head, I'm guessing.

Further research lead to the discovery of this tweet posted Jan. 4:

"We are excited to welcome the new Philip K. Dick robot to the Hanson family."

Then I discovered this video on YouTube, supposedly of the new PKD-bot. I wouldn't know; the video wasn't working when I visited. The caption reads:

"Hanson Robotics just rebuilt the Philip K. Dick Android! To replace the android that we lost in 2005, Dutch public broadcasting corporation VPRO sponsored this new robotic Phil. The robot is smarter and more sophisticated than ever, and is growing smarter all the time. Phil lives!!"

Hanson Robotics' website is not particularly helpful and I was unable to find any further info. But I did find this quote:

"This robot [I think they're talking about the Albert Einstein one] tracks faces and sound, percieves [sic] facial expressions, and mimics the user’s facial expressions. Our belief is that understanding human expressions can help to model human empathy and enable machine empathy."

Straight out of a Phil Dick book, man! Now I'm no cyberneticist, but that sounds like BS to me. Notice how that word 'understanding' suddenly pops up in the second sentence. 'Recognizing' and 'understanding' are not the same thing. Similarly, these machines demonstrate the difference between 'being alive' and 'being on.' Obviously we are a ways away from the technology depicted in We Can Build You, which, ironically, is set in the 1980s.

Here's some video of the PKD-machine 1.0.



But more to the point, now that Hanson Robotics has rebuilt their Philip K Dick automaton, I have to admit that this brings me no joy. I have no desire to meet it, to hear its canned responses to inane questions. The joy people seem to enjoy from these pale homo-imitations, whether they're at Disney Land, Chuck E Cheese, or pretending to be a quirky science fiction writer, comes not from the fact that these automatons mimic our behavior accurately, but that they mimic it at all. In other words, these robots get laughs whether their responses are uncannily human, or idiotically out of place.

These machines don't get any closer to consciousness than my answering machine, but I think we tend to see consciousness in something shaped like us. And that's weird and fascinating to me, but I'm not going to lose sleep imagining that sentient beings are being constructed and exploited against their will by Hanson Robotics. I prefer to imagine Hanson Robotics as a harmless, blooper-prone operation toiling away at the impossible while foolishly insisting it is almost within its grasp.

This new PKD-bot has a sort of Michael Savage-separated-birth-thing happening.

BBC to Air 'Bring Me The Head of Philip K Dick'

BBC Radio Three is scheduled to broadcast a program entitled "Bring Me The Head of Philip K Dick." The website summarizes the episode:

"Gregory Whitehead's dark, surreal and satirical drama, set in contemporary America, centres on a deadly futuristic weapon in the shape of the android head of science-fiction writer Philip K Dick. Invented by a shadowy research unit inside the Pentagon, the head - which believes it actually is Dick himself - is wreaking havoc on society and must be stopped before it finds its body."

The program is scheduled to air on Sunday March 8, at 20:00 hours. I don't know when this is exactly, but it looks like the show will be available as a podcast. More info here.

This sounds good, and the character names sound better:

Cryptica Scriptura ...... Elizabeth Aspenlieder
Cathy Nebula ...... Karen Beaumont
Reverend Darkleigh ...... George Bergen
Nancy Robinson ...... Hilary Deely
Philip Dooley ...... Richard Jackson
Tiffany Splenda ...... Karen Lee
The Potato Man ...... Jon Swan
Perky Pat ...... Anne Undeland
The Patriot ...... Gregory Whitehead
Written, produced and directed by Gregory Whitehead.
Music by Laura Wiens and Nick Zammuto.
Poem by Jon Swan.

Update: Haven't listened yet, but the early reviews are positive. You can stream the audio until March 15 right here. Anyone know how we could get a podcast of this?

Update 2: Listened to the program last night, whoa, it's a trip. Make sure you take your herbal supplements before listening....

Video of the 'Phillip K. Dick' Android Discovered on YouTube: Updated

I'd never seen video of the PKD android. It's sadder and way weirder than I imagined. I feel for it! Notice the misspelling. I guess the android spells Philip with two Ls.

Update: Anne Dick emailed me about the PKD android and writes:

"I went to see the robot on your web site. Oy vé!!!! When it came out a number of years ago, Laura called me to warn me that it was about to be in the national news and that it talked and answered questions, having been programmed with PKD's actual words. I was terrified that it might come to the door (along with parrapazzi and video cameras) to talk with me. What would it say?! Laura reassured me that it couldn't because it didn't have any legs. Later I had a fantasy of it coming to the door and me besting it with great verbal ripostes.

This robot, poor thing, unlike the one in my fantasy, was so passive. Its face was narrower than Phil's. It did look something like him although he had a bright alert look and this robot has a rather bland expression. Phil would have dominated, in a charming way, any conversation around him while this poor version, (I felt sorry for it), just had to sit there and try to answer all that silliness."

Great points. Thanks Anne!

Headless Man Sues, Loses

In legal news, a lawsuit filed by David Hanson and Hanson Robotics (the creators of the PKD android) was dismissed by a California court on March 29th. Hanson sued America West airlines after leaving PKD's electric head in the overhead bin on a trip from Texas to San Francisco. Read the (high-larious) decision here or here.

Here are a few highlights:

"Plaintiff David Hanson (“Plaintiff”) has lost his head. More specifically, Plaintiff has lost an artistically and scientifically valuable robotic head modeled after famous science fiction author Philip K. Dick (“Head”). Dick’s well-known body of work has resulted in movies such as Total Recall, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, and a large group of admirers has grown following his death in Orange County, California, in 1982. His stories have questioned whether robots can be human (see, e.g., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)), so it seems appropriate that Plaintiff reincarnated Dick as a robot which included the Head, valued at around $750,000. (Motion 1:9-10.)"

I never knew people outside the Bush administration could write snarky court documents. Can you imagine the laugh PKD is having in the Palm Tree Garden over all this? Can I sue Hanson for negligently creating a dangerous surplus of dramatic irony?

The brief continues:

"Plaintiff brought the Head onto the plane in a carry-on duffel bag and stored it in the overhead bin. Plaintiff fell asleep during the flight from Texas to Las Vegas, and woke up when the plane arrived in Las Vegas. (Motion 1:22-25.) On waking, Plaintiff immediately left the plane to catch his connecting flight to San Francisco. (SUF ¶ 2, SGI ¶ 2.) Perhaps because he had just woken up, Plaintiff lacked the total recall [ba-dum-bump-chee] to remember to retrieve the Head from the overhead bin."

I can't believe they didn't take this case to Judge Judy. She would have loved to deliver this line:

"While hearts may be left in San Francisco, heads apparently are left in Orange County, or are simply lost or stolen."

The legal brief concludes:

"Philip K. Dick and other science fiction luminaries have often explored whether robots might eventually evolve to exercise freedom of choice. See, e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey (a HAL 9000 exercises his freedom of choice to make some bad decisions). But there is no doubt that humans have the freedom of choice to bind themselves in mutually advantageous contractual relationships. When Plaintiff chose to enter the Contract of Carriage with Defendant he agreed, among other things, to limit Defendant’s liability for lost baggage. Failing to show that he is entitled to relief from that agreement, Plaintiff is bound by the terms of that contract, which bars his state law claims...The Court must GRANT Defendant’s Motion. But it does so hoping that the android head of Mr. Dick is someday found, perhaps in an Elysian field of Orange County, Dick’s homeland, choosing to dream of electric sheep."

Closure, finally! Oh and if you're reading this and you have the head, nice work. Obviously David Hanson was not ready for the huge responsibility of keeping track of PKD's head. I hope you're putting it to good use, or that it's putting you to good use.

Thanks Gabriel McKee!