Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dick’s 1968 novel, set in a post-war San Francisco whose animal life has mostly died off, following the bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he hunts six escaped Nexus-6 androids while a second thread follows John Isidore, a man the society has written off. The test that separates human from android is an empathy test, and the book spends its length undermining it. It is the novel Blade Runner was made from.

Context: the best-known work on a16z’s Dick shelf and the most directly useful one for anyone building systems that classify people — the plot is a classifier with a false-positive problem and a bounty attached to its output.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Philip K. Dick — the author.
• Blade Runner — the 1982 adaptation, already in the watch queue.
• The Minority Report — the other Dick work here about a system that decides who someone is.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.