New allies, new mysteries, and new revelations await X-ray Company inside the SRE Base.
I was unable due to time constraints to write a bonus article for Part 2, so I’ve tried to make up for it with this one.
Many of Philip K. Dick’s stories explore this very heady and mind-boggling topic. Now what I’ve written below is not meant to be informational, but an insight into my approach adapting PKD’s writings for this audio drama.
This article is as spoiler-free as possible but assumes you’ve listened to the first two parts of the mini-series.
Philip Kindred Dick was one of the first writers to tackle the subject of humanity coming to terms with artificial sentience in the form of robotics. Unlike his famous contemporary, Isaac Asimov who often wrote his robots as slaves dealing with topics of oppression, PKD tended to look more inward at the social and psychological consequences of humans losing their sense of uniqueness in the universe.
What made Second Variety so interesting to me was that it was ‘not a macro view. The characters were ground level dealing with the revelations of the story as individuals in the middle of something far more significant than their ability to comprehend. They didn’t have information beyond their limited perspective as a tiny speck at the center of the moment in time that would alter humanity forever.
If a robot (or replicant, or alien, or mutant) can think and feel, create, and make mistakes, what does it mean to be human on a personal level? Do we lose our sense of self? How do people resist this new displacement? Do we succumb to the new social order, or do we bend reality to accommodate our own egos?
In the past, we have looked at technology as the progressive movement towards better lives through innovation, the Disney view. Better technology meant less work and more leisure. The vacuum, the microwave, the answering machine. The constant march away from the dismal existence of the caveman towards an inevitable utopia.
The more we could let our technology do for us, the better.
Then we entered the age of the algorithm, the smartphone, and social media. These all made the same promises. Let us do the work for you. We are here to make your lives easier. And its true, life is probably easier now. But there has been a trade. Instead of these innovations helping us clean and cook, they help us communicate, navigate, make friends, find love…define our worth. The tasks they help us with are often emotional, and help to shape our perspective on the world.
Virtual Assistants like Siri and Cortana help us with almost everything, and they are only going to get more advanced and capable. Something I find increasingly fascinating is how often AI is now trying to blend into our lives disguised as humans. Things like customer service calls, business chat systems, political text messages. You can have a full conversation with someone you think is real only to discover they weren’t if you make the realization at all. All this has the compound effect of warping our reality.
Now I’m not saying any of this because I’m making judgments about these aspects of modern living. Only as a way to relate the world we live in today as one surprisingly similar to the ones in PKD’s imagining. I think people are dealing with the same sense of displacement from what is real.
Maybe that’s why Philip K. Dick’s stories continue to be so relevant to us.
I’ve tried to take Second Variety, a story written in the mid 20th century when the technology PKD imagined was so far fetched as to be the same as magic, and weld it to the world we live in today. Our world. The one where self-replicating, self-designing, creative robots are only a few short steps away.
PKD claimed to believe that much of his writing was real and that the visions and hallucinations he claimed to experience gave him unique views into other worlds and other futures. All that aside, I can’t help but wonder what Philip K. Dick would have thought about the world we are in today.
Want to explore more content inspired and influenced by Philip K. Dick?
Dive into the worlds he created and add a Bluray or Book to your collection while also helping to support the podcast.
Movies:
- Bladerunner
- Bladerunner 2049
- Total Recall
- Minority Report
- A Scanner Darkly
- Next
- The Adjustment Bureau
Books:
- The Philip K. Dick Reader (Includes Second Variety)
- The Philip K. Dick Collection
- The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- The Man in the High Castle
CREDITS
Writer/Host/Director: Jonathan Pezza
Sound Engineering & Design by Jonathan Pezza
Additional Sound Engineering: Jeremy Pezza & Ivan Kozlov
The Cast Includes:
- Sandeep Parikh
- Amy Vorpahl
- Kelli Dawn Hancock
- Leonid Andronov
- Alexandra Amick
- Christopher Amick
- Melissa Starr
- Darrin Cummings
- Philip Gray
- Dede Harlan
- Matt Hobin
- Alexander Mercado
- Jeremy Pezza
- Jonathan Pezza
- Steven Pezza
Score provided by: epidemicsound.com (Use discount code curiousmatter to get 2 months free)
Sound Effects provided by: Soundsnap.com