0: Humans as Androids as Humans

Amelia Smith
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

One of the tropes we talked about in class this week was that of robots that are indistinguishable from humans. I’m thinking here of characters like that of David in the film Prometheus, the androids being hunted down in Blade Runner and the Terminators from the associated films. These characters can fool humans into believing they are also human not only because of their advanced intelligence but because of their appearance which is outwardly biological.

There’s a tension in this trope, it seems, as it reflects the desire that is taken for granted that we will create robots that are indistinguishable from humans in appearance and that because of this success, we will need a way of keeping track of those creations. A deep anxiety is an undercurrent that should we not be able to distinguish androids from humans, they will use that against us in violent or at least dangerous ways. Blade Runner has a lot of these themes, for example.

There’s implicit othering in this process, that even if androids are not different enough from humans for us to recognize it, they are still a them and represent a threat because of this.

The design choice to make androids appear exactly as humans do (or especially as ‘idealized’ humans, which is such a loaded choice of image itself when ‘idealized’ tends to represent conventionally attractive and dominant norms) already reflects countless design choices and commitments. Why would we want them to look human and even have, to a degree, the same physical limitations that the form of the human body has? This is especially so when we seem so frightened of the possibility that we will succeed in this.

Why create indistinguishable androids at all?

One of the themes in Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep by Philip K. Dick that stood out to me was the copying of other animals into android form. Because of the environmental devastation, true living creatures are exceedingly rare and as such become a status symbol. People of lower socioeconomic standing have to make due with owning replications of animals and of course the more similar or indistinguishable the better.

On the surface, I’m not sure this is disturbing. Given the option of having a replication dog that was behaviorally and outwardly physically the same as a living dog but without some of the limitations (food, care when I’m absent, illness, so on and so forth) is actually attractive in many ways. In the story though, this practice of keeping replicant animals comes to a shattering moment when a toad that the main character finds in the desert and believes to be living is actually a replicant. As a side note, having typed that sentence, it sounds a little flippant and near ridiculous, but grant me that it is actually a pivotal and emotional moment.

This is presented in the context of course of the environmental devastation, so there’s an overwhelming sense of loss in the discovery. Everything living is artificial, perhaps, or we’ve lost the beauty of organic life.

Would we feel this loss, given a circumstance of being surrounded by people who all turn out to be androids? If we couldn’t distinguish them from humans, why does it matter so much to us that they aren’t actually human?

Perhaps there’s an existential anxiety here, a loss of uniqueness of humanity and organic life that we fear (perennial question: what does it mean to be human? Why does it matter?). Looking back at my dog example, I wonder if I would feel that the relationship is somehow cheapened by the internal structure of the dog.

Do androids dream of electronic sheep? This is an interesting in that it seems like we are the ones dreaming of electronic life and determined to pursue recreation — even perhaps as opposed to creation.

avong

Graduate student in Philosophy, researching and writing on the ethics of A.I., Edtech, and other technology.

    Amelia Smith

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    avong

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