Analysis: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Potential spoiler warning for a fifty plus year-old novella...

Recently I finished my first read-through of the classic sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick. It is best known for being the inspiration for the Blade Runner films. In a funny coincidence, a good friend recommended the book about six months ago to me, and that same week I ran The Big Hoodoo in Trail of Cthulhu as a one-shot, which features Phil Dick and other famous sci-fi authors in the adventure (unfortunately I enjoyed that adventure less than this book). There will be mild spoilers for the novel.

A few thoughts struck me about the book:

• Dick’s prose is beautiful, particularly in the description of transcendence and the emotional landscapes he paints, such as chapter two’s description of the empathy box collective experience.
• The mood dialer devices are an analogue for the measures we take to drown out our emotions. 
• The fear of the silence from Isidore. We are surrounded by a cacophony of voices and an unending onslaught of events. Even in our private moments we seek to escape the silence by escaping through a screen, or an endless Spotify track.
• A focus on the emotional and empathetic responses of humans, and perhaps the core argument that apathy and inability to empathize is a symptom of psychological problems. Perhaps even more, acts of violence are, like in our normal social relationship, considered highly taboo. Yet our media, stories, and games often have a significant focus on violence in one form or another.

The novel remains important due to its core question: What does it truly mean to be human? In the age of AI, even with its still limited large language model applications, these questions are still relevant. Dick’s work remains resonant across the years, as it grapples with the same void of meaning that we feel in the modern world. The blurring between the real and the false in our society and discourse. The search for empathy, and the desire to connect to other living beings—the hollow promises of technology that we can attain such a level of meaning. And the truth that perhaps the essence of being human is both the abject void of loneliness juxtaposed by the brief ecstasies of complete connection with others across that void.