Philip K. Dick’s classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, was made into the movie Bladerunner. In order to make the movie, a lot of the book was left out. Movies are short stories, not novels. Sadly, the movie doesn’t really capture the question that Dick posed throughout his work: “what is real?”, although it did do a reasonably good job at capturing the “what is human?” question specific to the book. I’m only bringing this up because my boss mentioned that he was buying an electric dog for his kids for Christmas. In the book, people were expected to have pets; because there weren’t enough animals to go around, many people had to have electronic pets, like Rick Deckard, hero of the novel, who owns an electric sheep. Well, Sony has electronic dogs, that exhibit dog like behavior. The more you pay, the better the behavior, although they also have models that take pictures for later viewing and such. The more expensive ones apparently will even recharge themselves. Despite the work, we’ll be sticking with the natural one we have.

Tags: electronic pets