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‘The Leningrad psychiatrists,’ Bryant broke in brusquely, ‘think that a small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale’ Consider the way they treat specials like Isidore, as well as the threat of relegation hanging over Deckard. There’s little evidence humans have much empathy, anyway.
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Decker initially labels Rachael Rosen schizoid before realising she’s an android Some mental health diagnoses muddy the scale.Decker is convinced bounty hunter Phil Resch is an android – ironically because he has no empathy for them Some humans have limited or no empathy.The test looks for the presence of empathy, because: “Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community.” The androids are nearly human but lack empathy: they don’t care what happens to others.
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So how to guarantee no humans are harmed along the way? But replicants are virtually undetectable some don’t even know they’re androids at all. The Voigt-Kampff scaleįearing androids are their better, more robust counterparts, human bounty hunters exterminate any they find on Earth.
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Meanwhile, androids – who live, breathe and think like people – yearn for the right to exist and be free ( see also I, Robot). No wonder their human masters fear they’ll become obsolete against such a superior species. They’re built to be identical to us, just at the moment biological humans are in decline. The androids exacerbate this fraught situation. This hierarchy is the book’s central tension: who counts as human? And, by extension, whose lives have value? For Isidore, even the nickname denotes his subhuman status as more beast than man (ironic given society’s new obsession with caring for animals). If the monthly tests show him to be sterile he’ll be bumped down the hierarchy of humanity, just like Isidore. He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind.” “Once pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history. Those who stay behind risk turning into ‘chickenhead’ simpletons like John Isidore, with profound consequences: Humans are dying out, too, though some are emigrating to Mars to escape the radiation. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, World War Terminus has destroyed the planet, veiling the sun with a thick blanket of radioactive dust. It’s not just replicants that separate present day Earth from the book’s vision of the future. But as the boundaries of real and fake collide, it’s hard to know which is which – and whether Deckard is on the right side. When a group of Nexus-6 androids escapes from Mars and heads to Earth, Deckard is assigned to ‘retire’ them. Rick Deckard, the protagonist of Dick’s 1968 novel, is a bounty hunter who destroys rogue androids (or replicants, as they’re known in the future). Dick’s 1968 novel asks if androids dream of electric sheep because they’re just like us, or because they’re smart enough to fake it.
