In today’s society, the increase in technological innovation has led to the creation of superior artificial intelligence systems. This will lead to a future filled with superior human like AI called androids. This begs the challenging question of how can you differentiate between humans and these androids? The deciding factor in this question cannot be seen by any physical distinction but by the inner workings of humans and androids. Humans have a sense of empathy when it comes to certain situations, but androids lack the empathy trait. This dilemma can be seen played out in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, and further supported in the article “What Becomes of Empathy” by Tim Recuber, and in the article “Empathizing 101” by Allie Grasgreen. I believe that empathy is not a good way of deciding if something or someone is human, there are too many flaws in this idea that empathy is a successful way of seeing what is human.
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is a story placed in the future after Earth was almost destroyed by toxins. Most of the humans ended up moving to Mars where the quality of life was great, and they used androids as servants. Back on Earth, life is not as precious, as in the standard of life was less than that on Mars. These human like androids are hard to spot in society and they are not accepted since they are all escaped slaves from Mars. On mars, they basically worked as servants to the humans, waiting on their every need and being controlled by the humans. The protagonist Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who is paid to find and retire these androids. He uses a certain test in order to test to see if someone is an android, called the Voigtt Kampf test. This tests an individual’s empathetic response to certain scenarios and based on their answers, Rick is able to tell whether they were an android or human. Humans are subjected to empathy but androids are not and this can be seen with every failed test of the Voigtt Kampf. When Rick gives the test to Rachel Rosen, he makes the statement about his briefcase “One hundred percent genuine human babyhide”(Dick). Rachel was supposed to react right away when she heard babyhide but she did not. There was only a reaction after a pause, almost like she had to think about it and fake an empathetic response. With any human being, they hear the word “babyhide” and instantly would feel sick or uneasy about that but Rachel wasn’t really affected by it. This is basically one of the only ways you can differentiate between human and android, and empathy can be considered a human characteristic.
In the book humans evoke empathy through an empathy box where they experience the life and teachings of Wilbur Mercer. Mercer tells the humans to be empathetic towards each other. While humans can experience empathy with Mercerism, androids cannot and that’s what sets them apart. One android, Roy Baty, knows this is the case and tries to create Mercerism like feeling. On his poop sheet it says “…and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids”(Dick 185). This demonstrates how even the androids themselves know that Mercerism can only be found by humans. The empathy in the humans can be seen when Rick realizes he is set up by having sex with Rachel Rosen. After having sex with her he wants to kill her because she has sex with him in order to build a relationship which would make him stop retiring these androids. He goes to kill her but cannot because of the empathy he has towards her. He has his laser tube ready to shoot her and at the last second he says “I’m not going to kill you” (Dick 201). This might not be the most in depth quote but it shows that he has empathy toward her from their relationship that blossomed; he just cannot hurt someone he fell for even though she played him.
In the article “What Becomes of Empathy”, there are a lot of good points made that can be helped to further explain how empathy is a human trait. This article starts out by Tim Recuber discussing how he reacted to the Orlando night club shooting. He states “Like so many others across the country and the world in the wake of the Orlando massacre, I experienced an intense form of empathy for the victims and their families…” (What Becomes of Empathy?). Along with Recuber, I and so many others felt the same empathy towards all the victims and their families. This same type of feeling can be seen in the book where Rick was somewhat empathetic over his old pet sheep that was killed from Tetanus. He discusses how he forgot to take wire off of the hay and that the sheep got a scratch, ultimately leading to its demise. From what I took from it he is empathetic towards the animal and really feels his sheep’s pain to the point where he gets an artificial sheep that looks identical to his old one. Also during the same conversation, you can tell that Ricks neighbor (Barbour) also is empathetic towards Ricks situation. He finds out that his sheep died and that Rick got a new one and he feels for Rick and understood his situation.
Another quote in this article directly related to everything that occurred in the book is when Recuber states “Empathy has increasingly come to be seen as an important component of efforts at social justice across a host of different contexts” (What Becomes of Empathy?). This is exactly what happens in the book with Rick and the battle between human and android. Empathy is an important factor in deciding what is right and wrong in this book. Is killing androids right? Do they deserve to live amongst humans? Once again, we can refer back to earlier where Rick’s empathy doesn’t allow him to kill Rachel, even though it would have been the right thing. In today’s society we see the people supporting certain events like hurricane relief or black lives matter because of a general empathy towards the victims. This can be seen with John Isidore and the three androids he was protecting at his apartment. Mercer tells him to protect them or he will be out of Mercerism. He also feels empathetic towards them and their situation of being rejected on Earth. Another big example of the lack of empathy in androids comes towards the end of the book when Ricks wife Iran tells him that their goat had died and been killed by a young-looking girl who he knew was Rachel Rosen. She had pushed the goat off of the roof killing it in the process. Any human being knows that animals are precious creatures who shouldn’t be brutally killed. Every time you drive by a dead animal you automatically feel empathetic and sad for the animal. In this case, no human being would’ve done that to the goat like Rosen did. The thought processes of humans and androids are just completely different in certain situations.
When it comes to empathy humans feel between animals and androids, there is a drastic difference. Humans feel the most empathy towards animals than anything else. Animals in this book are considered to be a royalty due to the fact that most animals became extinct due to the toxic dust. That is why everyone wants to buy an artificial animal, because of what owning an animal says about your status. On the other hand, androids get no empathy from humans; in fact they receive the opposite. All throughout this book, we can see humans killing androids with no remorse for what they do. Granted, they are technically on Earth illegally, but they are still murdered and to have no type of emotion towards these androids shows a lack of empathy on the human’s part. This begs the question can empathy really decide if someone is human? With all of the examples in the texts and even in real life, we can see that empathy is not a reliable test of a human. This can be seen in both the novel and in real life with people always murdering others and having no sympathy or emotions toward the situation. For example, if someone robs another person and gets shot to death people react positively to it nowadays as if the robber deserved to die for that. More and more people are becoming less empathetic, making it increasingly hard to base someone as human because of empathy.
The next article, “Empathizing 101” by Allie Grasgreen, discussed how one college president had the idea that you can teach empathy to people. If this is so, then you could teach empathy to humans like when the individuals in the book were subject to the empathy box. They kind of learned how to be empathetic from Wilbur Mercer. On the other hand, when it comes to androids, they can’t learn anything after they have been created because it is all about the processor inside them. Once they are created, all they can process and understand is preprogrammed so there would be no possibility of them being capable of learning this skill. In my opinion this cannot work. People are either born or taught empathy at an early age, or they were born without it and weren’t taught at a young age. Unless you teach an individual at a young age, they will never be able to learn empathy. The same goes with androids, if they never were programmed with empathy, they’ll never show signs of it.
From the information provided in these three sources, we are able to try and determine what makes us human. The main concept that is discussed is the fact that humans experience empathy in the appropriate situations. This is false because throughout the novel and in today’s society we see a huge lack of empathy in humans. There is no way you can say that all you need is empathy to determine if someone is human. If anything, humans looked more like androids in this novel if we are basing everything off empathy. The author really tried to use empathy to differentiate human and android and did a very good job, but there are just too many cases where empathy or lack thereof doesn’t prove you’re human.
Works Cited
Dick, Philip k. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey Books.
Grasgreen, Allie. “Empathizing 101.” Inside Higher Ed, 24 Nov. 2010,
www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/24/empathy.
Pages, The Society. “What Becomes of Empathy?” Cyborgology, The Society Pages, 26 July
2016, thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/07/20/what-becomes-of-empathy/.