Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Empathy as the Last Human Frontier

Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, at a moment when the science fiction genre was beginning to take questions of artificial intelligence seriously as philosophical rather than merely technological problems. Dick’s framing device is elegant and brutal: in post-nuclear San Francisco, where most animal species have gone extinct and most humans have emigrated to Mars, the primary measure of authentic humanity is empathic capacity. Androids, the most sophisticated products of Earth’s remaining industry, are physically indistinguishable from humans but fail the Voigt-Kampff empathy test — a polygraph-like assessment of involuntary emotional response to scenarios involving animals and other beings.

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter licensed to “retire” — Dick’s clinical euphemism is precise and intentional — androids who have escaped their Martian servitude and returned to Earth. His work forces him to confront the question the novel poses to the reader: if an android responds to its own death with something that looks indistinguishable from fear, does the classification matter?

The Mood Organ and Mercerism

The details of Dick’s world are where his genius operates most distinctly. Every human apartment is equipped with a Penfield mood organ — a dial device that allows residents to select their emotional state each morning. One can program “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom,” or schedule depression for a Thursday afternoon. The device is simultaneously a convenience and a horror, and Dick treats it as both.

Mercerism, the dominant religion of the post-nuclear world, involves all adherents simultaneously grasping handles that connect them to the experience of Wilbur Mercer, an elderly man eternally climbing a stone hill while strangers hurl rocks. The experience of shared suffering is the foundation of human community — and the novel asks whether that community can survive the discovery that Mercer may be as artificial as the androids Deckard hunts.

These invented institutions do more philosophical work than the android plot itself. They interrogate whether authenticity matters if the functional result is identical, and whether a manufactured sense of connection is meaningfully different from an organic one.

What the Film Left Behind

The 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner is a masterpiece of visual science fiction, but it streamlines Dick’s novel into something cleaner and more conventionally noir. What it loses is the novel’s humor — dark, absurdist, and very much Dick’s own — and its genuine interest in the secondary characters. J.R. Isidore, a “chickenhead” (cognitively impaired human, deemed unfit for emigration) who shares a building with escaped androids, has an interior life the film reduces to atmosphere. In Dick’s telling, Isidore’s care for the androids who cannot care back is the novel’s moral center.

The novel also refuses the film’s romantic resolution. Dick is not interested in whether Rick Deckard can fall in love with an android; he is interested in whether Deckard can maintain his professional empathy — the capacity to kill — after he has begun to feel something for his targets. The ending offers no comfort.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A foundational work of science fiction that asks whether empathy can be manufactured, and what we lose if we decide the answer doesn’t matter.