Technological Dominance, "Discarnate Men," and the Vestiges of Humanity in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their respective texts, William Gibson and Philip K. Dick both envision the place of humanity in a world dominated by technology, and both perceive and illuminate the dystopian possibilities that may result from the exponential development of technology. By invoking Marshall McLuhan’s observations regarding technological dominance and the resulting “discarnate man,” this essay will aim to show how the numbed interiority of the characters depicted in Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream? is the result of their interactions with technology which has massaged them into new forms of being. Furthermore, this essay will show how, by using AIs and replicants as doubles (or doppelgangers) of the human characters, both novels depart from conventions of science fiction by turning the focus away from the non-human, and back towards human emotion, touch, and empathetic response.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".