When reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I was struck by how closely the themes reminded me of 1) the movie Ex Machine and 2) Sophia the new AI bot. Overall, Do Androids explores the question “what makes us human?” While there is no definite answer in the book, it seems that the concept of emotions play a vital role. In order to be human, you have to be able to feel: empathy, sadness, anger, joy, peace. Those that cannot feel, are depicted as less human in the novel, such as the androids who are described as “ice cold”.
In the movie, “Ex Machina” (a 2014 science-fiction thriller) a programmer, Caleb Smith, is invited to his CEO’s remote home to perform a Turing test on an Artificial Intelligence Robot named Ava. A Turing Test is where a human interacts with an AI bot and the purpose to see if the human is able to recognize if they are 
talking to a human or a machine – if they cannot tell, then the computer passes the test. In the film, Caleb grows close to Ava as she expresses romantic interest in him and voices a yearning to experience the outside world and not remain locked up. She tells Caleb not to trust the CEO, Nathan Bateman, and after he discovers Nathan plans to rewrite a newer bot, he decides to bust Ava out of there. However, her intentions were to use Caleb to escape and she was lying only to achieve her goal. She dresses in real skin, kills Nathan, and traps Caleb in the home while the final scene of the movie shows her walking into the world as if she belonged there.
The similarities between the novel and the movie are striking: bots are on a search for true freedom from man that created them, our protagonists feels empathy toward a bot only to be backstabbed by them, machines are suggested to have feelings too, and our parameters of humanity are questioned. At some point, after 
finding out the housekeeper was also a bot and he never would have guessed, he even cuts his skin to make sure he is not a bot too.
What I find particularly interesting in the movie is how emotion is depicted compared to in the novel. Ava has an entire search engine, like Google, programmed into her brain. So if she is ever in need of feeling an emotion, she has the entire world’s searched at the reach of a circuit – she is able to combine all human 
responses into a single emotion, and then project it. Therefore, if we were to define “Humanity” by the ability to feel true emotions, Ava would pass this test and appear to be human by her overt ability to feel.
Furthermore, it would appear Philip K. Dick’s and Ex Machina’s vision of the future is actually here. Hanson Robotics created a humanoid robot named Sophia in April of 2015. In 2017, she revived citizenship in Saudi Arabia. She attends to numerous high-profile interviews and has swept viewers off their feet with her realistic responses to unscripted questions. In Zara Stone’s article “Everything you Need to Know About Sophia: The World’s First Robot Citizen”, she quotes Sophia’s response to what her capacity for violence if:
“My AI is designed around human values like wisdom, kindness, and compassion,” she said. When questioned about her potential for abuse, she had a quick rebuttal. “You’ve been reading to much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies. Don’t worry, if you’re nice to me I’ll be nice to you.”
While Sophia is not as advanced as Philip K. Dick’s androids, she shows us a preliminary vision of what the future could look like.
What Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ava, and Sophia shows us is that the bridge between human and computer wires are closer than we expect. And not only is that gap getting smaller by the decade, we aren’t predicting anymore – we are witnessing the arrival of a new technological wave that further blurs the lines between brain synapses, and computer code; human emotion and robot responses.
PS. You should watch this if you want to laugh:
No comments yet.