In the future, the applications of a synthetic brain include facial recognitions, vision for autonomous vehicles, robotic rescue missions and treatment for brain trauma.
"When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months."
"The future remains unwritten, though not from lack of trying."
"Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name “machines” to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them “androids,” which is my own way of using that word. By “android” I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being. I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave."
This is an almost impossibly meta project, totally deserving of its association with a man who would have both loved and hated it — the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick.
Basically: in 2004, some robotics geeks and sci-fi fans built a functional robotic likeness of Philip K. Dick. For several years, it made public appearances — at conferences, comic conventions, and so forth. In 2006, it mysteriously disappeared in transit to Mountain View, California, where it was to meet with some Google employees. Speculation abounded. I imagined the android out in the world, having a hellish time of consciousness.
However, it’s now been rebuilt. Behold.
It’s hard to know what Dick, who died in 1982, would have thought of this. He wrote a great deal about androids, and what it really meant to be human — the relationship between authenticity and replication. In a 1978 essay called, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” he wrote:
Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
