What Is It to Be Human?:Robots and Artificial Intelligence in the Works of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick

• Main Authors: Michelle Tung, 董育廷
• Other Authors: Kurt Cline
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/u5fpj5

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 102 === This thesis considers the question that has long been asked since Frankenstein. What is it to be human? Is it intelligence? Is it empathy? Is it moral standard or something else? Science Fiction is a unique genre that provides us with alternative scenarios and exaggerated phenomenona through which we can search the meanings and essence of being human from a different perspective. Within the future context in Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick’s works, I am going to discuss the above questions respectively. In the first part, I will draw a comparison between Asimov and Dick’s robots, examining the way they portray their robot characters and discussing the authors’ faith or worries toward the human-robot society. In the second part, I will use Douglas Hofstadter’s Strange Loop theory to locate robot intelligence in both Asimov’s …That Though Art Mindful of Him and Dick’s The Defenders. Through the two authors’ imagination, robots will inevitably share our intellectual kinship. Moving on with Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in the third part, I will interrogate whether empathy distinguishes men from machines as Dick suggests. Dick creates a series of characters from the most inhuman man to the most human robot which lead the readers to ponder the link between empathy, moral standard and humanity. In the last part, I will use Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man to search for the cause which leads the robot protagonist Andrew Martin to a two-hundred-year pursuit of human identity. Through Andrew’s journey, we can discover the answer to the initial question: What is it to be human? Exclusion and classification are often used to estrange other race, class or social groups in the human history. In both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Bicentennial Man, humans strive to secure the power hierarchy by creating rigid boundaries to differentiate themselves from robots. The robot characters in both stories suffer from social exclusion- exploitation and oppression are copied to posthuman society. Donna Haraway proposes a concept of “affinity” in her famous Cyborg Manifesto, she claims the possibility of a breakthrough in which the differences between organic and artificial can be breached, allowing both the born and the made to find their shelter in artificial humanity.