Who owns your voice?
A glimpse into AI-generated TV
I have seen the future and it is no better or worse than our mindless present
One of the background details of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that I often catch myself sometimes wondering about is the concept of “Buster Friendly”. This novel was the basis of Ridley Scott’s Harrison Ford starring Bladerunner (1982) and its sequel, Bladerunner 2049. The movie and the book actually have very little in common. Dick’s novels can be too abstract and philosophical to translate to celluloid. Ridley used the novel as a starting-point in imagining his own cyberpunk retrofuturist world and cherry-picks concepts, story and world ideas from Philip K. Dick. Many ideas are left out (such as the central role of fake pets). Buster Friendly, too, never made it to the movie.
In the novel, Dick leaves it to the reader to deduce that Buster Friendly (a media personality whose show plays in the background of many scenes) is an android or some kind of artificial intelligence. The metaphor, that could have been intended, is that famous news readers and presenters are just sock puppets who could easily be replaced by artificial intelligence. Clues about the artificiality of Buster Friendly’s personhood are sprinkled throughout the book: Buster Friendly’s…
