Philip K Dick’s Nightmares Are Becoming Our Reality

In recent decades, intrusive or authoritarian government policies have invariably been described as ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’. But these days, you will increasingly find more allusions to another past master of dystopian fiction: Philip K Dick.

A prime example of this arrived last week, following reports that the British state is now running a ‘murder prediction’ programme. Apparently, the authorities believe they can use the personal data of known offenders to ‘predict’ who is at risk of committing future murders. ‘Government creating Minority Report-style “murder-prediction tool” that uses personal data to identify most likely killers’, ran a Daily Mail headline. This was a reference to the 2002 film based on Dick’s 1956 novella, The Minority Report, in which a ‘precrime’ police unit, with the aid of psychic individuals called ‘pre-cogs’, hunts down those who – it is foreseen – will commit a crime.

The idea of ‘precrime’ is indeed the stuff of science-fiction nightmares, but Dick’s hellish forebodings in this area and others have been coming to fruition for some time. The idea that the police could apprehend individuals in anticipation of what they might do has been steadily gaining ground, especially with the rolling out of face- and pupil-recognition technology and hi-tech CCTV systems that detect, isolate and track individuals of concern.

Indeed, the film, Minority Report, appeared at a time when ‘precrime’ was already becoming a reality. A few months after its release in July 2002, the then UK home secretary, David Blunkett, announced plans to lock up mentally ill people who it was thought could commit future offences. By 2013, according to the FBI, ‘predictive policing’, whereby police forces use data based on past crimes to determine police patrols, was already being used widely across the US.

The revival of interest in Philip K Dick in the new millennium, with a plethora of films and television series based on his stories – A Scanner Darkly (2006), an updated Total Recall (2012), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and The Man in the High Castle (2015-19) – show how his fears and concerns have become increasingly resonant in the 21st century.

Alongside the excess power exercised by governments, corporations and technocrats, a recurring theme in his oeuvre was the rise of artificial intelligence – a pre-eminent source of anxiety among many today. Dick was especially worried about the physical and existential threat AI might pose to mankind. It was a concern raised in his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which became, most famously, the 1982 film, Blade Runner.

In Dick’s tale, humanoid robots have become more intelligent, cunning and devious than the humans who had made them. ‘The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master’, reflects the novel’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job it is to pursue and ‘retire’ the renegade androids. That was merely the most immediate threat posed by the ‘andys’. The other was far more disturbing.