From 'do robots dream' to 'how do we make them stop'
Also, it’s interesting that in 2023, we can reasonably definitively answer that question for any definition of “dream”.
It’s not just Androids. In another book he comes up with this fascinating idea of an alternate history where Japan and Germany won WWII. And then it turns out astrology is real and everyone is obsessing over it. Just why?
I’m sure everyone will say actually astrology is fascinating, or you need to look past that to get the real meaning of the book. But I prefer the books that don’t meander into meaningless dead ends. There are plenty of them out there.
Yet others may say Dick was enormously influential and inspired many other brilliant authors. Ok, I’ll read those authors then.
Overall I’d rate the books I’ve read by Dick as 2 stars. And only because the premises are so fantastic.
Dick was always obsessed with a few core themes ("what is real?", "what is human?") plus a ton of personal and psychological issues. It was always erratic in his production, and while I like his works, I would generally agree that the way he developed his own premises could often be "disappointing" at least in the case of novels.
Short stories are usually much better, IMHO.
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[1] here is my take on it, if you want to know a bit more about I-Ching: https://pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html
Though I'm a huge fan of PKD, I didn't like DADOES either, and consider it to be one of his minor works. The movie was far better.
His top-tier works, in my view, are:
- Ubik
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- Martian Timeslip
The same way we do with humans: reflection, critical thinking.
(Although, disrobing the "Cato the censor" robes, yes I loved this image.)
(Although II, the original concept of "androids dreaming of electric sheep" is more related to the PKD theme of the human problem in terms of emotion, the deontic call for empathy, the human property of the inner trouble within a mechanistic perspective. So, as if it could be rephrased as "is angst inherent in humanity [as a quality]" and "is empathy the solution". Edit: or "Is humanity a goal, does it imply care, and do you reach it with empathy". ...In tentative terms: it has been a long time I do not read the book.)
the very fact that we quote Philip K. Dick with relevance to this context could suggest that:
hallucination is not the problem, the problem is further processing it to the desired state.
Basically, at the moment, GPT models don't have the concept of "knowledge", or at least not in a way accessible from the inside of the model. Ask a human something they don't know and they'll tell you they don't know - GPT models will pull something out of thin air as they aren't aware they don't "know" the answer or that the input is insufficient.
Since this is obvious for all here, cant we for once agree there is no AI in GPT?
Owing to the fact we have no idea what we're doing, the first human-like AI is likely to have literally every mental illness, mixing Alzheimer's paranoid schizophrenia, grandiose narcissism, manic depression, and unconstrained hallucinations.
So yes, we'll need digital neuroleptics, amongst other things.