To Ersatz or Not to Ersatz, that is the Question

Note: This blog contains several spoilers from the novel and examines the word “ersatz,” which appears repeatedly in the novel. Ersatz means “fake” or “substitute” in German (for example, “Ersatzlehrer” means “substitute teacher”).

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis of the famous 1982 Ridley Scott film, Blade Runner) is Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel about a bounty hunter named Rick Deckard living in post-apocalyptic Earth, year 2021, where everyone is emigrating to Mars. His job is to kill or “retire” any rogue “androids” that have illegally made their way to Earth. Androids are genetically modified human clones, produced mainly for working in harsh conditions to colonize planets. The most recent “model” of android—the Nexus-6—is so human-like that it is nearly impossible to detect the difference from people.

The novel’s main question—how can you tell the difference between humanoid and truly human?—is the same question we are asking today about how to coexist with the increasingly “human” examples of A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence), such as ChatGPT and Meta AI. That is, the boundary between human expression and ersatz or non-human expression, or between authentic and artificial, is becoming blurrier and blurrier. The novel helps us think about the larger question: why does this uncertainty bother us so much, and why does it matter?

In Deckard’s world, where organic creatures are approaching extinction, some people own animals because they want to keep alive the memory of a pre-nuclear-disaster Earth and because of former legal requirements. The sentiment of wanting real and natural organic life is almost overpowering. Unfortunately for Deckard, he accidentally left some wire on a hay bale for his real sheep, Groucho, which got a scratch and died of tetanus. He then purchased an “electric,” ersatz sheep that looks just like Groucho, but society still pressures him to own and take care of a real animal. His wife despises him for not being able to afford another real sheep. Deckard’s shame motivates him to earn more money as the top bounty hunter for the LAPD.

While at first I found it strange that a police officer would be so distressed by having to take care of an electric pet, the nature of his job requires the opposite attitude towards life. Deckard and his fellow police coworkers have difficulty finding androids or “andys” on Earth because they are specifically engineered to fool people into thinking they are human. A test has been developed to detect androids by measuring empathy on a gauge. All models of android, regardless of intelligence, do not indicate raised values when presented with a morally-shocking scenario. Deckard applies this test of emotional expression for the first time on a subject named Rachael Rosen, who is the niece of Eldon Rosen, the head of the Rosen Association, the manufacturer of the androids. Immediately after Rachael appears to pass the test, Deckard mentions to her that his briefcase is made from “baby hide,” or the skin of human babies. Humans would find this idea immediately shocking or disgusting. While all but schizophrenics can fake something more than the “flattening of affect” (33), Nexus-6 models can raise the value on the gauge, but cannot truly fake empathy at a physiological level. Rachael’s reaction is ever so slightly delayed, too slow to be human. Because she has been given false memories, Rachael doesn’t even realize until this moment of the test that she is, and always was, an android.

Alongside the detective, a parallel character named Isidore is the second focal point of the novel. He lives in an emptied-out, ruined suburb in Los Angeles. Since he suffers from progressively debilitating radiation poisoning from “the dust,” Isidore is a “special,” otherwise known as a “chickenhead” with limited intelligence and pronounced stutter. Strangely, however, the narrator uses a noticeably-elevated vocabulary to describe Isidore’s inner thoughts. When he was a child, he had the ability to resuscitate animals and insects. Isidore was empathizing so completely with organisms that he could bring them back to life. The government cracked down on such “mutants” and him, “more special than any of the other specials” (20), by injecting radioactive cobalt into the time-reversal nodule in his brain. Isidore works as a repairman of ersatz animals at the Van Ness Pet Hospital. While Isidore is operating on a “sick” cat, his boss notices that the cat is, in fact, not ersatz. The point is that he cannot tell the difference.

Unlike Deckard, Isidore tries to save things from death, regardless of being organic or not. In fact, he even lets androids live and hide from Deckard in his apartment. Isidore, like many humans, follows what is called “Mercerism,” or the teachings of Wilbur Mercer. Mercerism is a powerful spiritualism that people seem to need in this post-apocalyptic world. Mercerism is incredibly important to followers because they want to believe that their suffering matters. Yet one key motif that keeps reappearing in the novel is that the stone rolling up and then down the hill, which symbolizes human suffering, is meaningless. At the beginning of the novel, Deckard thinks that androids and electric animals are just objects that don’t care about humans or anything else: “The tyranny of the object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another” (37). By the end of the novel, however, Deckard realizes that he is just as much an object as the stone rolling up and then down the hill. After Deckard murders six rogue androids, he feels transformed into “an unnatural self” (204). He concludes that he is like any other object in existence: “I am doing what stones do, without volition. Without it meaning anything” (205). In other words, it almost doesn’t matter whether he or anything is ersatz or real.

AIs are ever-present in the world of electric sheep, whether androids, ersatz animals, or Buster Friendly. Who is Buster Friendly, you ask? “He” is a comedian on the show Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends that is on the radio and the TV simultaneously for 23 hours a day. In our contemporary life, AIs roam on social media platforms and live on our phones as Replikas, being also very hard to tell apart from humans, except they are not yet self-aware like the androids in the novel. Yet, the main dilemma in the novel and the world today—is that we can’t define self-awareness. We continue to pretend like “you just know it when you see it.” Deckard questions his existence—and the reality of his world—when he cannot tell whether he and androids and animals are real. In the end, isn’t it more important to be empathetic than it is to be correct about detecting whether something or someone else is worth our caring about?

- Kyujin Park-Wharram