In the book, this encounter is only alluded to, but Dick imagines in his notes that it could be played up visually in a movie with a scene that could be a “horrifyingly mechanical episode of half dream, half reality, with Rachael melting superficially—but by doing so, exposing a steel-and-solid-state electronic gear beneath.”
There is nothing Deckard can do to make her a real woman. Rachael warns Deckard as he is undressing her, “Don’t’ pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For both of us.” Dick feels that the deep frustration, disappointment, and horror engendered by this situation, along with the self hatred he feels, would be enough to fuel Deckard’s rage against the remaining replicants.
This is not at all how the situation is dealt with in the movie. There, Dekard’s relationship with the replicant Rachael is much more natural and satisfying. It is suggested in the film that she is an upgraded replicant, one that is becoming almost indistinguishable from humans, or as the motto of the Tyrell Corporation that built her provocatively claims “more human than human.” Here their relationship seems real and Deckard’s motivation is to finish his assignment to retire the other dangerous replicants and then escape with Rachael before another bounty hunter comes to destroy all of the replicants, including Rachael.
This reworking of Dick’s plot is not out of place. It actually captures one of his major themes: that empathy is a key human capacity. In the final scenes of the movie, we see one of the most startling chase sequences ever filmed, as Deckard goes from being the hunter to the hunted while he desperately flees for his life from the replicant Roy Batty through the decaying ruins of a mostly vacant apartment block, even as Roy’s body is shutting down as he reaches his predesigned end; his planned obsolescence. Before he goes, we see him toy with Deckard in a final game of cat and mouse—teasing and wounding him just for the fun of it and perhaps also as revenge for the replicants Deckard has killed so far. But something happens within Batty during those last minutes, and when it comes down to it, the trained killer Roy Batty, with his enemy Rick Deckard hanging dozens of stories up off the side of a building, is unwilling to allow Deckard to fall to his death. As Roy Batty’s last living act, he saves Deckard and pulls him back to safety. Roy Batty shows compassion and empathy, he sees himself in the frantic terrified eyes of his own sworn enemy; he gives as he wishes to receive—he gives life. Roy, thorough his compassion and Rachael, through her capacity to love have both become human—perhaps more than human.
How to Build a Moral Robot
Sometimes science fiction becomes science fact. In many ways it seems that we are very close to entering a world that contains the kinds of robots and androids that Dick was so good at imagining. Much of Dick’s fiction presents dark and dystopian worlds and situations, so on the surface, one might think that he had a pessimistic attitude about the future. But his motivation for writing like this was not a belief that the future will necessarily be dark, but rather, as a way of warning us to avoid these possible futures.
It may be that Dick, and other authors from his age, were so good at describing the hells of a world torn by nuclear war that it made such a world unthinkable—and that this is part of why this future is one that the real world has, so far, avoided realizing. Dick has given us multiple views of intricately imagined future worlds where robots exist and many times these robots are dangerous and immoral. These are warnings of what not to do with the technologies we are actually building.
Dick’s fiction shows that machines built to be ersatz humans lead to problems. That is, if our motive is to build machines to replace humans, then we are denying the value of being human. Dick’s warning is that machines built to closely resemble humans, but which lack the deeper human moral drives such as empathy, can only result in an impoverished world unfit to live in. On the other hand, machines that are built to extend human capacity and fit into the lives and work of other humans would have the opposite effect.
We should build machines that enhance our ability to create a just and moral society, rather than ones that lead to more violence and alienation. Building a machine that is almost human will also cause us to diminish our expectations from other humans. We will begin to treat other humans as if they were machines and we might also act more like machines ourselves. In our attempt to pull machines up to our level we must work to not, in turn, pull ourselves down to meet the machines in a middle ground where neither of us can achieve any sort of wisdom or happiness. So we should be careful in building humanoid machines and closely inspect our motives for doing so. Why do we need a robotic, nurse, soldier, firefighter, or butler? If the answer is only to replace the human with a machine because humans are too troublesome to deal with, then that is the wrong choice.
Closely related to the last point, is that robots should not be built to play on human sexual desire. As we saw above, the book that Blade Runner is based on provides a chilling example of what a faux sexual relationship with a realistic android would be like and the results are violent and depressing. Healthy human sexual behavior is more than just a purely physical act. If it were only that, then robotic sex dolls would be acceptable substitutions for human partners. But to be a good sexual partner you need to have a deep empathy for the feelings of your lover. All but the most advanced androids would be lacking this, as they do not experience the world as a human and thus would have a difficult time empathizing with them. Simply put, they would be faking it.
Just as a human relationship built on deception might be fun for a while but is ultimately doomed to fail, so too would a human-robot relationship. Unfortunately, it seems we are fated to ignore this warning, as realistic sex dolls are readily available now and are likely to continue to become more and more realistic. Now if an android wasn’t faking its love, then it would be possible to have a healthy relationship with one. It is very unlikely that this will happen soon. Until that time we will have all manner of cleverly animated and life-like dolls that will be attempting to fool us. Navigating this interim period is going to be tricky. In the near future when your relationship with your robot lover turns sour, don’t say you weren’t warned.
A final lesson to take from the writing of Dick is that if we intend on building real artificial moral agents, we will not be fully successful unless they are capable of a kind of empathy that is logically equivalent to agape. It won’t be hard to build an artificial moral agent that can reason about simple moral situation. In fact, if the machine is completely motivated by its own reasoning process, and if that reasoning process is programmed to operate on sound moral principles, and if those principles lead it to understand that it has a responsibility to act in a moral way, then regardless of what it looks like or is made of, it will be a moral agent. Which means this machine would have certain appropriate rights and responsibilities that would be based on the level of capability it has to reason morally. This is also true of humans: typically an adult’s behavior is judged more critically than the actions of a child who might not know better. The possibility of building simple moral machines is not out of the question. But these machines will not be equivalent to the most moral of humans until they can achieve the kind of empathetic feelings we discussed at length above.
Even if you don’t plan on building or buying a robot anytime soon, there’s a vital lesson to take from Dick’s thoughts on androids. In one of his greatest masterpieces, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the astronaut Palmer Eldritch returns from deep space exploration, but he is no longer human. On his return, he brings with him a powerful alien hallucinogenic that he markets to his fellow humans.
This is all part of a plot whereby Palmer Eldritch attempts to enslave the human race and become its new demigod. Eldritch has become a machine and in so doing, he has lost the ability to see humans as anything more than a resource for his own self-aggrandizement. Dick is unequivocal on this point. We must resist the netherward pull of the world that seeks to turn us into unfeeling machines.
&nb
sp; It can happen to any of us, it can happen to the best of us; it must not happen to you.
PUBLIC RELATIONS GUIDE FOR NEW OFFICERS DIVISION OF PRECRIME
HUMAN RESOURCES OFFICER PETER MURPHY
Welcome to your new job in the Division of Precrime! This guide reviews, and responds to, what our many critics say. Since it includes strategies for responding to defense lawyers hired by precriminals, this guide is for internal purposes only and is classified as highly confidential. Anyone who conveys, or will convey, its contents to a non-officer will be punished.
01. Don’t We Arrest Innocent People?
Our critics often say that we arrest innocent people since, at the time they are arrested, these people have not yet (to take the most important example) committed murder. As Danny Witwer puts it in the instructional training video you have just been shown:
WITWER: I am sure you all understand the legalistic drawback to precrime methodology . . . Let’s not kid ourselves: we are arresting individuals who have broken no law.
JAD: But they will.
FLETCHER: The commission of the crime is absolute metaphysics. The precogs see the future and they are never wrong.
WITWER: But it is not the future if you stop them. Isn’t that a fundamental paradox?
This is not the radical break that our critics make it out to be. Before the precogs and the establishment of our division, people were arrested and charged with certain crimes before they committed murder. For example, people were charged with attempted murder. And even before making an attempt, people were sometimes charged with conspiracy to commit murder. But no one complained that attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder involved arresting innocent people.
One reason no one made this complaint is that attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder were themselves crimes. But since our legislators passed a law that added future-murder as a distinct criminal act, isn’t this no longer a problem?
This won’t make our critics happy, since it would still allow for cases in which people are arrested and charged with future-murder even before they entertain the idea of murdering their alleged future victim. This is the case that our critics like to raise since the intentions, and general state of mind, of the arrested person are very different from the intentions and state of mind of either someone who attempts murder, or someone who conspires to murder. Someone who has not even entertained the idea of murdering someone does not meet the mens rea—or ‘guilty mind’—condition on crime. The person’s mind is not yet tainted with any kind of legal fault.
This, we concede, is true; but our critics only consider reactions to threats that are responsible for being threats. It is fitting to respond to such a threat by blaming and punishing the person who poses the threat. And it is fitting that the feelings and intentions behind one’s response be punitive in nature. In short, a punitive attitude is appropriate.
But what about instances in which the perceived threat is a person, but that person is not responsible for being a threat? For example, consider an infant that has a highly contagious and dangerous disease. Since the infant is not guilty on any mens rea score, it is not appropriate to have a punitive attitude to this threat. In response to threats of this kind, a different attitude is appropriate, one that is not punitive and does not blame.
Shifting from attitude to action, what should we do in the face of each kind of threat? Our actions might very well be similar. In both cases, it is sensible to contain and isolate the threat so that the risk posed to other people is minimized. Quarantining the infant in this way is justified as a preventative measure. Here then is a suggestion: we ought to do the same to the pre-criminals that we arrest who are innocent at the time that they are arrested. Arresting them would then be justified as a preventative measure, even if doing so with a punitive attitude would not be appropriate since they would not be culpable.
Officer Philip K. Dick made this clear in the case study that you read. Rather than using the language of punishment and blame, he is clear that the Division of Precrime is attempting to “neutralize” Anderton. He describes the Precrime system as “the prophylactic pre-detection of criminals.” Similarly, in the instructional training video, the precriminals are kept in a facility called The Hall of Containment.
Here then is one line of defense against the charge that we arrest innocent people. It is true that in some cases, we do arrest innocent people. However, we are justified in arresting and containing them as long as we take a non-punitive attitude toward them; this is the same quarantining attitude that we should take to an infant who has a contagious and dangerous disease.
02. But Is It Really Inappropriate to Punish Pre-criminals?
To outline a second kind of response to the charge that what we do is wrong because we punish the innocent, let’s take a closer look at something that so far has just been taken to be obviously true: the thought that punitive attitudes are appropriate only if they are directed at the guilty.
Consider first a case in which it is appropriate to punish, and have punitive attitudes to someone, for something that they will do, but have not yet done. Philosophers call these pre-punishment cases because at the time the person is punished, they are not yet guilty. Suppose, for example, that Walter Wrath tells you that he is going to wrongfully harm someone tomorrow. Walter is quite credible when it comes to this sort of thing: many times in the past, he has said such things, and every time he followed through. So you are justified in expecting that he will do this tomorrow.
Moreover, suppose you are also certain that, just like in all past instances, Walter will not be caught; so neither you, nor anyone else, will be able to blame him after he has wronged the person—by then Wrath will be far away. And you can’t do anything to make sure that he is caught, since he has you tied up. But right now you do have the opportunity to blame him, and to punish him (though not in a way that will incapacitate him). As long as it is better that he is blamed and punished than it is that he is not blamed and punished at all—and surely it is—it is appropriate to blame and punish him, despite the fact that at the time you blame and punish him he is innocent.
Precrime cases are somewhat similar to the Walter Wrath case. In a precrime case, the person who is arrested will do it. We can blame them now, or we can wait until they have done it and blame them then. Here though is the crucial point: if we prevent them from doing it, this does not make blaming them now any less legitimate. This is because what explains why they don’t do it is not the right kind of fact to exculpate them. They don’t do it, simply because other people stop them from doing it. But the fact that other people stop them is no credit to them. They remain on the hook.
03. What Evidence Establishes Guilt?
Let’s turn to a different criticism. This is the charge that we have no evidence that the person we have arrested is guilty. To our critics, it looks as if we undercut our own case when we arrest someone. This is because we thereby prevent the person from committing the crime; so obviously we have no evidence that they have committed the crime.
03.1. Evidence of an Actual Murder, Attempt, or Intention Is Not Needed
But return again to the days before precrime, this time to a criminal plot. What if those who were arrested said that by arresting them, the authorities interfered with what was going to happen, and that consequently this put the authorities in the position of not having any evidence that those arrested would have committed the crime, or even that they would have attempted to commit it? There is no way to verify that they would have committed it, or even attempted to, since they are now locked up and are unable to commit, or even attempt to commit, the relevant act. This last claim is true, but it has little force: It was still sensible to arrest, and incarcerate, those who were plotting.
One reason this was sensible lies in the charge itself: they were charged with plotting to murder. Evidence of murder is not needed since they are not charged with murder. It is similar with those charged with a precrime like future-mur
der. They aren’t charged with murder, or attempted murder, or even plotting to murder; they are charged with future-murder. So evidence of an actual murder, or evidence of an actual attempt, or even evidence of a plot is not needed.
It is worth observing that future-murder is more serious than many instances of plotting to murder, and many instances of attempted murder. This is because even without the intervention of law enforcement, sometimes plots and attempted murders do not result in a person’s death: some plots just fizzle out, and some attempts are bungled and fail. By contrast, without our intervention a future-murder always succeeds, and always results in loss of life.
The crucial question though is this: what is the Division of Precrime’s evidence that an arrested person was going to commit murder? As Anderton pointed out to Witwer in the instructional training video, the fact that something is prevented from happening may not falsify the claim that it was going to happen. Anderton demonstrates this point by sending a sphere down a ramp. When it comes off the end of the ramp, Witwer prevents it from hitting the floor, by catching it. They discuss:
ANDERTON: Why did you catch that?
WITWER: Because it was going to fall.
ANDERTON: You certain?
WITWER: Yeah.
ANDERTON: But it didn’t fall; you caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen.
Witwer was right that it was going to fall despite the fact that it did not fall. This is so because Witwer’s prediction was more specific. Fully articulated, he predicted that as long as the path of the sphere was not interfered with, it was going to fall. But since its path was interfered with, Witwer’s prediction wasn’t tested; hence it was not falsified.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 23