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"It is change ... that is the dominant factor in society today... the world as it will be. This means that ... every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.""
- Isaac Asimov
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| Voight-Kampff Empathy Test | ||
| A test consisting of a set of images and questions, asked while the subject's biometric data are gathered; intended to separate humans from non-humans. |
The Voight-Kampff test attempts to distinguish androids from human beings by autonomic responses to questions that should elicit an empathic response. Because it seeks to gather and measure biological information for security purposes, the empathy testing procedure is a kind of biometric identification system.
| "I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voight-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments... "This" - he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires - "measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response... This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. |
| Technovelgy from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1968 Additional resources -
|
(From Harrison Ford Gives The Test)
The history of tests to distinguish human beings from machines is short, but interesting. Alan Turing devised what is commonly known as the Turing Test; the crux of the test is language usage.
It is intriguing to note that Dick has vacated the field from the standpoint of trying to defend human intelligence versus machine intelligence; he relies on emotional response. Biometric data are also used to authenticate the person being tested. At the time the novel was written, computers were able to play chess, but poorly. (Turing himself wrote the first chess program in 1950, using a limited size board and fewer pieces. Claude Shannon published the first article on the subject, outlining how a computer would evaluate and choose positions. Chess programs reached Grand Master status by 1988.)
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Voight-Kampff Empathy Test-related
news articles:
- Is Your Candidate Human?
- Portable MRI Scans For Psychopathy Like Voight-Kampff
- Emotion Detector Like PKD's Voight-Kampff Empathy Test
- SimSensei Plus Kinnect Equals PKD's Voight-Kampff?
- New Robotic Scanner Does Automated Eye Imaging
- Musk: Defeat The Bots, Authenticate The Humans
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
