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"...a market economy is essentially a genetic algorithm for solving resource allocation problems..."
- Charles Stross
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| Nexus-6 Brain Unit | ||
| The processing power behind android intelligence. |
It takes a lot of processing power to emulate human responses. Let's look under the hood of the most advanced replicant in the novel.
| The Nexus-6 did have two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no intelligence test could trap such an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not since the primordial, crude varieties of the 1970's.
The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough pragmatic standpoint evolved beyond a major - but inferior - segment of mankind... But new scales of achievement, for example the Voight-Kampf Empathy test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism - an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.
|
| From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1968 Additional resources -
|
It is interesting that in Dick's world of the novel, the androids are able (to some extent) to mimic empathy by calculating the appropriate response. The nature of the Nexus-6 hardware is not discussed, but it is made clear elsewhere in the novel that the only way that androids can be distinguished for certain is through bone marrow testing. So we can assume that the "brain" of an android is practically indistinguishable from our own. Philip K. Dick's concept of an andy is very close to the original concept of a robot from Capek's classic work from the 1920's.
And how do you calculate your emotional responses?
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''... major cities of Earth have free electrical power conveniently processed from their own noise.'
'The appearance was enough like a giant witch's broom to justify the nickname.'
'A vast circle of scarlet stars came up into the greenish desert dusk.'
'He had constructed an organ, a brain, of metal, entirely inorganic and lifeless...'
'I shall never forget the sight... when the yellow gleam of the precious metal appeared under the star dust.'
Oh, and now I suppose someone will develop the robotic porch pirate.
'This thing will start at one end of ...a house and build it complete to the other end, following drawings only.'
