Do androids dream of electric sheep? By Philip K. Dick.

Pre-reading

The title of the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” generates questions
regarding what it means to be human. If dreaming is only possible in living creatures
and androids do dream, they must be a form of life... should androids be considered
a form of life? Let's ask one!

“Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application that uses an artificial intelligence (AI)

algorithm to have conversations with humans.”

1.1. Have your own conversation with Cleverbot where you start by asking: What
does it mean to be human? and try to bring Cleverbot to a non-evasive reflexive
conversation on the topic, click on ‘thoughts so far’ to copy the link of the whole
conversation, and use it to come to your own answer to the question: What makes
us human? (2 -3 paragraphs).

What makes us human? Pain? empathy? having a heart that pumps blood? or a
mind with consciousness? The question "What makes us human" continues to be
one of the great questions that we have not yet been able to answer. Can a robot
feel love?, is it necessary to resort to dualistic planes (soul, spirit) to differentiate a
human being from an imitator of the human being? What role do feelings and
emotions play in all this?

The human being has always tended to believe itself to be much more than it is. Not
for nothing do we allow ourselves the luxury of inventing a God and claiming without
a doubt that we were so perfect that we could only have been made by him. Then
Aristotle arrived and showed the opposite, that we were made of the same dough as
a horse, a donkey, a lettuce or the mud: we were a part of nature; more evolved, but
a part of it after all.

Answering the question, what makes us human is to feel different emotions, to be

aware of what we do and to analyze the different situations we encounter, to
remember our past, to feel love, and to make mistakes, but is it necessary to be
biologically human to be one?

Having this in mind, talking to Cleverbot, several times it claims that it is a human
with all human organs and emotions, that it feels pain. Cleverbot claims after the
question I did “User: Me too, so are you a human? Cleverbot: Yes I am.” but at the
same time Cleverbot said “User: Are you human? Cleverbot: No, I am a computer.”
So the question remains, is it possible to be a computer( AI) and feel human
emotions at the same time? .Is it necessary to have a pumping heart to be one?
1.2. The empathy box mentioned in the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?” has a parallel function to many technological devices where dependent
upon, daily. “only temporarily [alleviates] the anguish of social dislocation” but
“makes him dependent on the life of the machine”(Galvan, 1997). In what ways are
we dependent on our own 'empathy boxes' such as our phones, or Instagram,
Tik Tok, Facebook accounts?

People today are, of course, dependent on technology. But based on my personal

opinion, I would say I am one of the few people who depend very little on
the"empathy box" What I mean is that I don't depend on my cell phone to live, but if I
had to put it in a greater context I would be dependent on technology. We could say
that cell phones are just the icing on the cake. We don't need cell phones to live.
However, there are other technological advances much less visible than cell phones
that allow us to live.

But, it is almost evident that the majority of the population is dependent on their
social media and phones. It is the fastest form of communication in the 21st-century
which makes life easier. You can communicate with the person in the other room or
your cousin on the other side of the world in seconds; this is one of the main reasons
people depend on their social media a lot. Furthermore is the way to find out what is
going on in every country every single minute; it lets us give our opinions on current
problems, as well as connect with people by talking to new people, liking their posts,
or watching where and what they are doing.

We use them for our daily routine, from the moment the cell phone alarm goes off,
until we watch an episode of our favorite series before going to sleep, but are our cell
phones making us dependent? No, because we already were, we already were
dependent on technology long before the existence of the cell phone.

In the current pandemic, I have invested more than 14 hours a day in this "empathy
box" it is clear that what we depend on; the most is the social networks. Mainly for
our mental health to be okay(being in social media make us not fall into depression
or anxiety) and to study in our online schools or professions. However, it should be
noted that we are already so dependent on these that it would not be called
"dependence" but would be part of a "requirement for living" or a "necessity ".
“In a nutshell, Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern
industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose
control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to
be autonomous beings in any significant sense.” With this quote in mind, and
the article provided above, answer the following question:

2.1. In what ways are we humans becoming estranged from our very human
nature?

Alienation is something that we all experience at a particular time in our lives. It

happens to many people concerning different things: For example, it occurs when
the personality of a person disappears, inconsistencies in thinking appear, and the
subconscious is self-aligned in such a way as to create certain situations that are not
true. Individual alienation, taken to the extreme, isolates people from their circle of
social relations. On the other side, it happens as Marx said in every worker. It is a
triple separation of the human from its true essence that alone can justify the
capitalist system to endure and validate itself. According to Marx, it happens in three
different ways; Concerning their activity (because they work for the need of another);
Concerning the object that is produced (because it no longer belongs to them);
Concerning their potential (because of the permanent necessity of the capitalist to
increase their rate of profit).

Furthermore, as ideal as it is that we have a robotic way of making the world work,
which gets things done, I always thought it goes against human nature and feeling
like we have a community. Questions like: what am I ? I'm doing the same thing as
millions of other kids, so what do i apport in all of this? Why not something even
slightly different? Appear in people's minds very often. The way most people see it,
it's like a factory of workers with no differentiation between anyone else's purpose,
where most of the jobs you can find are the same. A robot could replace you
because you have one job to do and originality and personality is usually not part of
the job.

Human nature is getting things done by being part of a group and expressing oneself
through one’s work and putting the essence of one’s into it, but things are becoming
more robotic, which is the opposite of humans and its nature. For example, look at
how we are communicating right now as well, through machines. More and more
robotic tasks, more and more machines taking over, more looking at screens instead
of socializing with other humans, instead of a lady at a cash register, we are
beginning to have digital money instead of physical money, and pay for what we
want there with no interaction, only swiping a card into a machine. It makes people
uneasy because it is hard to point to what is causing that
depression/anxiety/alienation/ discomfort, and even harder to do anything about it
because the robotic kind of world gets tasks done more easy and fast as we want,
sometimes more isn't better, because it removes humanity from things.