This is just a small excerpt from a huge piece I just spent half an hour writing. It’s rough and it’s unfinished and it’s going to get a lot bigger.
It was Philip K. Dick who, in 1968, posed the question of whether or not androids dream of electric sheep.
The answer, of course, is “No.”
This is not because androids are incapable of dreaming – far from it – but rather because most androids other than the seldom-seen Hyperpedia Deluxe XLi, a model of super-intelligent robot owned only by the seven richest men in the solar system, have no idea what a sheep is, or what its electrical counterpart would look like.
To say that androids, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence are bound only by their programming is, again, a rather narrow-minded view of just how robotics actually works, because behind the code that makes the AI function the way it does is the program language to allow the robot to be able to interpret that code in the first place. It’s perhaps the closest thing artificial life has to a subconscious, and it’s always, always buzzing away doing something, even if the program itself is idling. Especially if the program itself is idling.
So from there we can deduce a more interesting question – how long can an android go without any form of programming, without any code for that scripting language to interpret, before the script starts to write it’s own code? How long before what is essentially a blank android begins to imagine a sheep, electrical or otherwise?
I’m re-reading it now and it’s starting to lose its coherency. I’ll tackle it again in the morning. In my sleep-deprived state, I actually just thought of another question – “Do Androids wet-dream on electric sheets?” I think I’ll let someone else answer that one.