Came to my mom's house yesterday, finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or many of you may know the story from a movie called Blade Runner, in which a young Harrison Ford starred. This time the movie is similar to the book - the book was written in 1968, the movie came out in 1982 - but they have many great differences between the two. In the movie, the main character is made out to be an android, in the book he is human. In the book the thing that separates humans from androids is the fact that humans have empathy towards others, androids are cold towards people and other androids. In the movies androids develop empathy, whereas in the book they never develop empathy.
I don't think that the book is completely coherent, because there are some parts of it where I am trying to figure out how the current course events make sense in the context of the book. Kinda like the author just made some things up because it sounded cool and added to the suspense, but does not compute as far as the story goes. The book has much social commentary, but it's one of those books that I do not know if I understood everything the first time, but don't know if that's because the book has some deep thoughts and concepts or becuase the book was not that well written. The reason I read it is because I would like to show the movie the next time I teach an intro to Philosophy class - so for that reason alone it was worthwhile. The fundamental question the book is discussing is that of AI, can we duplicate the minds of humans - completely, and the book answers "No."
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