Who Wants To Live Forever?

 

First off, two nuggets of weirdness I’d like to share with my beloved readers, whoever you might be.

I went to buy beer at the Safeway, a regional supermarket.  Beer is an “age-restricted item”, which requires a Safeway Authority Figure to verify my State-Issued Vehicle Operation ID to make sure a child is not purchasing low-potency alcoholic beverages.  In her casual haste to fulfil her duties, the SAF entered my year of birth as 1169, prompting the Cashier Computer to go into “WTF” mode, meaning I would have to bring my purchase from the self-checkout register to the Actual Flesh & Blood Store Cashier register.  Once the Cashier verified I was 52 years old, instead of 852 years old, my beer purchase was finally consummated.  And there was much rejoicing.

Then, the weather report.  As my hearing is well below milspec (which is why I’m an attorney and not an Army-trained killing machine) I have the TV thing set with captions.  And in the wintery time, in a place such as Northern former Confederate State Virginia which sometimes sees that snow stuff, obviously that possibility was germane to weather reporting.  However, the captioning indicated that because the temperature would be rising above freezing, the snow would transition to “eyes”.  Raining eyes?  Really?  Now that’s a form of precipitation I’ve never seen.   Imagine that.  We’re all Mortys living in Rick’s world. 

I’ve been plowing through Westworld, Season 3.  Whereas season 1 & 2 took place in the “park” area, somewhere in Utah, season 3 takes us out to the real world, as the Hosts (Androids) manage to determine how to survive on their own.  Aaron Paul, aka Jesse Pinkman from “Breaking Bad”, is here as veteran with PTSD who ends up working with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood).  Of course, the #1 issue is always, who is a guest (human) and who is a host (android)?

Biological Functions.  This came up during “Blade Runner”, the early 80s sci-fi film based on PKD’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with Harrison Ford as Deckard, an assassin who takes out rogue replicants (androids), the main one being Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).  Replicants are hardwired with a two year lifespan, which Batty is trying to fix, only to find that it can’t be fixed.  Then the faux-clever question is, “is Deckard himself a replicant”?  First off, if he was doing it for more than 2 years, then no.  But here’s another big issue.

Humans have these things called biological functions.  We eat, drink, poop, pee, sleep, get sick, age, and die.  Androids need at least some power source, but beyond that there’s no reason to program them with all those biological functions.  Why do so??? That would be like retro-engineering a modern car with the same features as a Model T.  Best to keep androids the way they are and not worry about making them replicate humans.

The really stupid thing is that aside from plot reasons, there’s no reason to show people in movies or TVs shows peeing or pooing, or getting sick.  So those occur off-camera, presumably, for any character who is human.  If you’re uncertain if you’re a human or a robot, the simple deal is:  do you get hungry and have to eat?  If you eat, do you poo?  Do you get older and sick?  The narrative of “Westworld” occurs over 20-30 years, and we see at least one human character age so much he’s played by two completely different actors at those different times.  But all the hosts – the most notable being Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Meave (Thandie Newton) look exactly the same.  Well, of course:  an advantage of androids is that they don’t age and are theoretically immortal.

The catch is, how does a HUMAN get to enjoy that immortality?  How do you transfer your consciousness from your meatbag, aging, peeing and pooing shell, into that sleek, non-aging host body?  So far as I can tell, none of the guests from Westworld made that transition.  They can make host copies of guests, but while the copies might have memories of the guest, there is no continuity of consciousness; the host is just a copy, the original person eventually dies.  The best they can do is reduce all the hosts’ personalities and memories to a small globe which can be removed and inserted into any other host body.  They can also make copies of these globes and inhabit multiple host bodies simultaneously.  Think of how the narrative might change with that possibility.  Anyhow, none of us are androids and unlikely to be one anytime soon, or ever.

Robocop.  One scenario where it did happen, albeit under somewhat suboptimal circumstances.  In the first movie, Detroit, facing an unruly police union, decides to avoid the issue by making robot cops: a robo-cop made from somewhat deceased cop, Murphy (Peter Weller).  Robocop starts off as a robot, but Murphy’s prior memories leach back in.  In Robocop 2, they pull the brain, eyes and spinal cord of the subject (truly evil bad guy) into a second generation robot.  They had to use the bad guy, Cain; the good guys they tried it with first immediately killed themselves.  Is this a truly practical solution?  Probably not.

In any case, the insanely rich and well funded Delos Corp never seemed to manage to figure out how to transplant an original guest consciousness into a host body:  the best they could do was somehow copy the humans into a very convincing android who supposedly had the original’s personality and memories.  But if the original human simply died at some point, what’s the point of all these android copies?  It doesn’t do the original human any good, and doesn’t solve the ultimate problem.

The other issue is that our brains have limited memory capacity.  Once we reach that limit, new memories are only acquired at the expense of old ones.  So if you could live to be 1000, but your brain can only reliably store 100 years worth of memories, which of those do you retain? That would be 10%.  Then if you live to be 2,000, we’re talking 5%, and so on.  This sounds like a problem which will never be fixed no matter how brilliant the scientists are.  Let’s talk to Dr. Strange…

BladeRunner

Recently I caught the long-awaited sequel to 1982’s “Bladerunner”, thankfully including Harrison Ford back as Deckard, though by now long-retired from the replicant-retiring business.  I’ll try to avoid spoilers for those of you who haven’t yet seen the new film and intend to see it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  The original Philip K. Dick story.  Mostly identical in plot to the movie, but the book has several elements missing from the movie: this whole business of robot animals (real animals are so rare as to be priceless, and even synthetic animals are valuable enough that a catalog of values – like the Blue Book – exists with regard to them) and Mercerism.  I should re-read it again, now that I’ve finally finished reading all of PKD’s scifi novels.

Original.  Ford stars as Deckard, an LAPD cop whose job it is to take out rogue replicants.  Apparently the replicants off-world achieved self-awareness and returned to earth, hiding out among humans.  The most deadly are Roy (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah).  Roy in particular is trying to find out from Tyrell, who originally designed them, if there is a way around their hard-wired life span.   Note: if Deckard could simply keep these two away from everyone else, they would expire on their own.  But how exciting would that be?

Sequel.   It’s thirty years later and a new replicant (Ryan Gosling) is trying to track down rogue older models, none of whom resemble Rutger Hauer or Darryl Hannah.  Clare Underwood is his boss.  He even has a virtual GF who keeps him company in his apartment.  Tyrell Corp is gone, replaced by Wallace (let’s see Neil Fallon wear that on a t-shirt at the next Clutch tour), led by an equally enigmatic CEO (Jared Leto).   In this particular case, what he’s got on his hands is evidence that Rachael, the replicant originally played by Sean Young in the first film, had a child – theoretically impossible for a replicant.  Who would design a female replicant with a uterus, ovaries, etc. and allow it to actually conceive a child?  Then again, Tyrell indicated that Rachael was different.  So it would seem...

Overall I’d say it’s a good sequel.  Gosling’s replicant is sympathetic.  Deckard is back - and just as crusty and badass as you would expect him to be 30 years later.  Lots of action and wastelands.  Pretty much what we’d want from a sequel.  Thank you, Denis Villaneuve (director of “Arrival”), for not messing around.  He did his job properly and didn’t let his ego turn this into something stupid. 

*

Here’s an issue loosely raised by both films.  Some people believe that Deckard is actually a replicant.  That theory should be conclusively shot down as he appears in this film taking place 30 years later.  Mind you, Dick himself addressed this issue during his lifetime and confirmed that Deckard is human after all.  Ford said the same, and only Ridley Scott advocates this – plus useful idiots on Facebook who love to cling to provocative but stupid ideas.

Humans have to eat, sleep, pee, poo, vomit, get sick, age, and die.  Female humans have menstrual cycles and give birth.  A replicant doesn’t have to do any of that and – unless programmed otherwise as the original series was in the first film and PKD’s book – effectively have eternal youth.  So for a replicant to truly emulate a human, it would have to be programmed to do all these things.   A huge pain in the ass for what?   

Moreover, the original series was expressly designed as workers.   You created robots so you couldn’t have to hire unreliable humans.  Why create unreliable replicants?  That makes no sense.  Moreover, K (Gosling) appears to have self-awareness:  he knows he’s a replicant.  Logical, as Roy and Pris (Hauer and Hannah) did too.  If I were a replicant, I’d be happy that I don’t have to eat, drink, pee, poo, get sick, and eventually age and die.  If I ever got tired of living, I could just kill myself.  Well, so long as I wasn't hardwired to die...

Can we combine the two?  Remember “Robocop II” where the bad guy was created by removing his brain & nervous system and implanting them into a robot.  The prior two specimens went nuts and killed themselves, as turning into a full-on robot was too nuts.  But how about implanting them into an expressly humanoid and/or replicant body?  Get working, people. 

Then take opposite scenario:  a replicant who is really human.  Huh?  The replicant wouldn’t need to sleep, eat, pee/poo, etc. any biological functions.  How would a human survive without doing all these things?  Unless some dumbass was creating replicants which did all this stuff, the sole purpose of which would be to pass them off as humans.  WHY? 

Bottom line is that anyone/thing expressly identified as human is 99.999% likely to be human, and anything expressly identified as a replicant is 99.999% likely to be a replicant.  

Philip K Dick

PKD was an American science fiction writer, mostly writing in the 1950s up to the late 70s.  By now I’ve read enough of his stories and books to make some sort of appraisal thereof, and a meaningful evaluation, though I still haven’t read all of them by now.

 Background.  Born in 1928, died in 1982, he is typically associated with Berkeley, well known as a bastion of left wing extremism (home of Country Joe (“Stalin”) among others).  Virtually his entire writing career concerned science fiction.  My closest comparison to him is Robert Heinlein.

 Themes.  Dick was less concerned with the specifics of technology than Heinlein.  Nor is there nearly as much sex in Dick’s books compared to Heinlein’s.  The topics Dick liked to address:

1.         Totalitarian dictatorships supported by high technology.  In his view, as societies grew more technologically advanced, the government improved its ability to spy on its own people.

2.         Anarchy & corruption.  By corruption I mean the gradual breakdown of technology – nothing works anymore and no one knows how to fix it.  As freedom and decentralization increase, technology decreases and approaches nature – anarchy and technology are treated as polar opposites.  Especially since technology is so closely related to dictatorship, people are uncertain, in a later anarchist society, whether to embrace technology again, although they sense some value in it for its own sake.

3.         Altered consciousness and alternate reality.  What is really going on?  Are we perceiving the real world, or something else? And how can we know for certain?  More so than any other writer, PKD’s stories often have you wondering, “what is really going on???”

4.         Robot self-awareness.  Particularly in “Second Variety”, this idea that robots achieve self-awareness and man’s creations turn against him.  Robots create more robots, and so on.  In “James P. Crow”, robots run the country, while humans are substandard – discriminated against and kept down – and no one can remember that it used to be the other way around, until Crow (taking an ironic pseudonym) manages to reveal the truth.

5.         Time travel, reverse time flow, paradoxes.  Time travel is as much an element of PKD’s stories as any other sci-fi writers, and he’s as likely to address the issues of causation as anyone else.

6.         His take on capitalism is more along the lines of, “damn incessant advertising for stuff we really don’t need”, and planned obsolescence.  He doesn’t seem to take on the system per se. 

7.         Many of his stories have an abrupt plot swerve at the very end, almost a “gotcha!” like “The Twilight Zone”.

 Short Stories.  He has more than I can count (121).  I read no less than 5 separate compendiums of them.  Clearly addressing them all would be useless, but here are the best – aside from the ones which were made into movies, which I’ll address separately.

 he Turning Wheel.  Asians as mystics controlling a futuristic anti-technology society; Caucasians are reduced to a small underground of lower class caste who actually understand technology.

 The Last of the Masters.  …is actually a robot, in charge of the last bastion of technology-driven, totalitarian dictatorship left on the planet.   A small team of anarchists emerges from the wilderness and takes on the Master in his home base.  This is the biggest “technology = totalitarianism” vs. “anarchists = nature” story.

 Exhibit Piece.  Mindf**k!  Bureaucrat/scientist can’t tell if the museum exhibit of a suburban home from several centuries ago is simply an exhibit piece…or if this is his real home and family.

 Pay For the Printer.  Another “dying world where nothing works anymore and almost no one knows how to fix anything” story.

 War Veteran.  Time-travel paradox involving a war between Earth, Mars and Venus.  By the end, the truth is revealed.

 Colony.  This is another paranoia trip: an intelligent alien race, very deadly and very aggressive, knows how to mimic inanimate objects.

 Nanny.  In the future, nannies are robots.  In addition to being loved by the children and taking care of them as well as any human possibly could, they have combat capabilities to defeat other robot nannies.  This means that parents have to constantly upgrade and trade in for newer, deadlier models.  The children are not at risk, but last year’s model certainly is!

 Holy Quarrel.  The computer running society develops self-awareness (yet again) and becomes a religious fanatic.

 Orpheus with Clay Feet.  A writer is considered too untalented to write his own material, so he’s initially sent back in time to serve as a muse to someone important.  Except that he screws that up so spectacularly, that they decide to send him back to Munich in 1924 to un-inspire Adolf Hitler.

 Waterspider.  A team from the future has to go back to the past to contact Poul Anderson at a convention of sci-fi writers in the 1950s.  This story seems like a “call-out” to a who’s who of sci-fi:  Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Robert Bloch, even himself (“Phil Dick”, as author of The Defenders).

 Beyond Lies the Wub.  The Wub is a very intelligent alien which produces odd effects when eaten.

 Not By Its Cover.  The Wub returns – with odd effects when its hide is used to bind books such as the Bible.

 Pre-Persons.  I could never imagine a story about abortions could be funny, but this one was.  Apparently the pro-choice movement succeeds in extending the time for legal abortions to the age of 12.  “Boobs are obsolete, like the Pontiac GTO.” 

 Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked.  A cynical “Wind in the Willows” meets “Married With Children” story.

 Faith of Our Fathers.  Apparently the Red Chinese managed to take over – and is continually dosing the entire population with LSD.  The resistance develops a drug which counteracts the LSD – yet the “normal” state perception varies, while the LSD perception is constant. 

 The Variable Man.  Astonishingly good story; they manage to get someone from the past, Cole, to fix their rocket in the future, to assist in the war against Proxima Centauri.  Cole has an amazing intuitive ability to not only figure out how things work, but also repair them and even improve them.  Lots of excitement and combat. 

 The Eye of the Sibyl.   A Roman noble is reincarnated in the future – his modern counterpart displays a natural inclination to cite Latin without realizing why.  I liked this concept of the “collective unconscious”, inheriting not merely genes but social and cultural memories.

 The Defenders.  After a nuclear war between the US and USSR, the survivors burrow underground and allow robot surrogates to continue the war above by proxy.  Eventually the humans discover that the surface had cooled and recovered long ago, but they had been lied to by the robots.

 Books.  He had 36, but of these I’ve only read a handful.

 The Man in the High Castle.  I described this earlier in my blog about alternate history stories in which Germany won World War II.  The Nazis run the East Coast of the US, the Japanese run the West Coast, and the middle is still independent.  Everyone consults the I Ching for guidance.  Fairly good, but not his best work.

 Now Wait For Last Year.  I liked this one.  It turns out that Earth is a former colony of an alien race and humans are not indigenous to Earth.  The humans from the original home planet (the Starmen) finally managed to reestablish contact with Earth, but treat the Terrans as second-class idiots.  They’re involved in a war with reegs (insectoid race like preying mantis) but the reegs come off as more sympathetic than the arrogant Starmen.  The main character ends up taking a drug which induces time travel – and even meets himself.  Very intriguing.

 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.  A popular TV/radio celebrity wakes up one morning to find his identity completely erased – no one recognizes him and his name is absent from every database.  Ultimately the answer lies with a policeman’s incestuous sister.

 Ubik.  Easily the biggest mindfuck book of all.  Joe Chip goes to the moon on a mission from Gene Lassiter, which goes horribly wrong.  From then on, things start getting weirder and weirder.  Towards the end we FINALLY get told what is really going on, and the truth is still strange and screwed up.  If they ever made this into a movie, “Inception” would get a run for its money.

 Movies.  Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying levels of faithfulness to the original story and commercial success.

 Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).  Easily the most popular movie, a real cult film.  The book has several elements missing from the movie: this whole business of robot animals (real animals are so rare as to be priceless, and even synthetic animals are valuable enough that a catalog of values – like the Blue Book – exists with regard to them) and Mercerism.  Deckard (played in the movie by Harrison Ford) sleeps with Rachel (Sean Young in the movie) a replicant who does not know she is.  His job is to track down replicants (androids) illegally on Earth – and kill them.  For their part, the replicants are dangerous and do not cooperate. 

 Screamers (Second Variety).  In a futuristic war, the robots originally developed by one side to help them win the war eventually develop self-awareness, begin fighting both sides equally, and develop new three new varieties of androids.  The first and third varieties are a wounded soldier and a 10 year old boy, but the “second variety” remains unindentified and at large.  More of this “who is human, who is really a killer robot assassin paranoia”.  The main character in the movie is played by Paul Weller.  Although the movie changes the human sides to fictional countries/companies, in the story the two sides are simply the US and USSR.

 Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale).  Here the story takes place all on Earth and all issues are resolved at home.   A bored Earthbound citizen goes to a memory implant clinic to have memories of a fictional Mars vacation artificially implanted in his consciousness – only to find that he had already been to Mars and subjected to memory erasing treatment by whatever government agency he worked for.  The movie uses the story as a basis for a much larger story, in which the man (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes back to Mars and gets involved in the mess there.  For this I’d recommend reading the story then watching the movie.

 Paycheck (same).  This has a similar memory-wiping deal; the story and movie are identical in basic plot but change the ultimate ending.  A high-skilled technician finishes a major project for his firm and finds, to his surprise, that instead of the expected fat paycheck, he’s opted to forgo that in exchange for the contents of an envelope which he left himself before undergoing the memory wipe – these contents are a bewildering collection of seemingly unrelated and worthless items.  The idea is that the contents of the package, when used correctly, will allow him to achieve a result 100x better than his mere paycheck would have been, if he can only figure out these clues he left himself.   Ben Affleck stars in the movie.  This is another one where reading the story first, then the book, makes sense.

 Minority Report (same).  In the future, crimes are solved before they’re even committed, by a “pre-crime” division which relies on a mysterious trio of psychics who predict future crimes.  Unfortunately, the main investigator, Anderton (Tom Cruise in the movie) finds himself implicated in a murder and then has to escape his own police force and find out what’s going on.  In the story he winds up committing the murder anyway (!) to salvage the pre-crime system. “Minority report” refers to the procedure of logging, but officially ignoring, the report of the third psychic when his/her report conflicts with the other two – Anderton finds that the minority report on his own “crime”, which might explain what is going on, is missing, i.e. he may have been set up by his rival (played in the movie by Colin Farrell). 

 A Scanner Darkly (same).  This Dick’s very intriguing critique of LSD and drug use, in this case a mysterious drug called Substance D, which doesn’t seem to directly correlate to anything we know of, but most closely resembles LSD; Substance D is highly addictive, LSD is not.  The main doper, Robert Arctor (played in the film by Keanu Reeves) is also a narc assigned to investigate his own house.  Down at the DEA headquarters he wears a sophisticated shapeshifting costume which warps his voice and disguises his identity.  He watches surveillance camera footage of events occurring at his own house, including himself.  His biggest problem is with his housemate James Barris, extravagantly portrayed in the movie (seriously underrated Oscar-worthy performance) by Robert Downey Jr.  Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder are also major characters.  The movie uses a unique rotoscope technique.