Reflection of "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep"

                  Reading a science fiction is at once fascinating and depressing. It’s amazing to imagine how technology would develop while it’s depressing to somehow acknowledge that even in the future, the selfishness of human will never change.

             “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep” is the novella that is fascinating and depressing. And it portrayed an interesting model of the future: humans and machines will become similar.

             This model is deeply related to the irony presented in the novella. In the story, Androids, who are supposed to be distinct (usually in an inferior way by human’s standards), are so similar to humans (both physically and mentally) that it is hard to know whether the one is Android or not. On the other side, humans in the story are becoming alike to the machines in that they try to program their mind status like the computers adjusting their state with programming.

This interesting phenomenon, humans becoming machine-like and machines becoming human-like, can be explained with the two factors: human’s desire to replicate themselves and to be superior to others. These seemingly contradicting desires of humans are actually same in an essence; selfishness. Because humans are self-interested, they want to make another version of them while willing to be superior to their replicas. And when linking the selfishness(people have) to the outcome of that impulse, it’s easy to understand the irony in the story: people’s desire to discriminate themselves with replicas simply resulted in the opposite situation, humans and machines becoming similar.

             Overall, I thought that the story was effective in depicting a dystopian society with the irony related to human’s desire.

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Jin Gyeong: You wrote on topic which exactly points out the main idea of the novella and what Mr. Menard talked in today’s class. Your analysis about the motivation of human making Androids was interesting. And I especially liked the expression “humans becoming machine-like, machines becoming human-like”. I think this short phrase really describes what’s going on now, and what will be like in future. How about adding more comparison between the Androids and humans before mentioning the ironies?

Rhee Ji Yoon: “Ironies” that you have mentioned at the start of second (or is it third?) paragraph are not mentioned and explained fully yet, right? (lack of timeL)