The Hayles article does a good job of showing what it’s like to be an android in Philip Dick’s universe. They are treated like objects yet somehow they have become aware of this fact and begin to argue for their subjectivity. Does this make them human? After all they are just man made machines. But they have the ability to think and reason and care for their own kind.
More interesting though is the technology required to create sentient robots. In today’s world, our artificial intelligence and computational linguistics are not advanced enough to accomodate a cognitive creature. We as humans still struggle to define consciousness so there is no way for us to grant [consciousness] to a machine. On the flipside, however, we can probably assume that scientists in Dick’s world have somehow mastered the theories of consciousness.
