{"id":75381,"date":"2018-01-17T19:02:23","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T03:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/philip-k-dick-and-the-fake-humans"},"modified":"2018-01-17T19:02:23","modified_gmt":"2018-01-18T03:02:23","slug":"philip-k-dick-and-the-fake-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/philip-k-dick-and-the-fake-humans","title":{"rendered":"Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/philip-k-dick-and-the-fake-humans.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier\u2014a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon\u2019s compensation structure. Much of the world\u2019s financial system is made out of bots\u2014automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).<\/p>\n<p>In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick\u2019s future, not George Orwell\u2019s or Aldous Huxley\u2019s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties\u2019 and sixties\u2019 California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.<\/p>\n<p>Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, <em>I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon<\/em>):<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/literature-culture\/henry-farrell-philip-k-dick-and-fake-humans#.Wl_wRA3hz00.facebook\">http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/literature-culture\/henry-farrell-phi...0.facebook<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier\u2014a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,41,418,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-information-science","category-internet","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}