The android is us, maybe?

I’ve been reading Blade Runner (in French) and it’s gotten me to think a lot about human programming. Androids like those in Blade Runner are now a common feature in today’s literature, cinema and television. They provide an instrument to interrogate a number of things, one being how technology can affect us as humans. But a more interesting thing to me is the interrogation of what it means to be human at all. In fictions such as Westworld, Her, and Blade Runner, the robotic “fake” humans reach a level of sentience and that makes the reader or viewer wonder at what point can these creatures still be considered not human? Can they ever be considered human? All their behaviors and memories can be ascribed to programming. They are thus not natural sentient beings. But these fictions also make rethink about my own humanity and how much programming determines my own behaviors, thoughts, emotions and memories as well. Yes, programming of humans. We have within us free will to choose to respond to a situation in very different ways. If I drop a cup and shatter it, I can: get angry, get frustrated, get sad, or I can laugh. What determines which reaction it will be? Perhaps how my day went before the incident. But where’s the free will? Perhaps a bad day at work will “program” me to be grumpy. But can I not re-program myself out of a bad mood so I can react to the broken cup with laughter instead? I think so. I think somewhere in there is some Buddhist thinking too, about the nature of the mind. There might be some science here as well. In research on things like stereotype threat, we see how societal biases and stereotypes can program us to underperform. But that these programs can be buffered by interventions such as value affirmation writing exercises. The documented positive results of these interventions are pretty impressive, all from a 5 minute writing exercise that ends up short circuiting the otherwise negative programming that comes with stereotype threat. So in a way, androids in fiction are a thought experiment of a simplified human that allows us to think about the nature of what it is to be human. Though we are now on track to see androids and artificial intelligences reach a state close to sentience pretty soon. Perhaps all the fiction that has been written on this topic may allow us to be better prepared, ethically and emotionally, to the advent of such new creatures on this planet.