But if the distinction is that fine, how fine is the moral distinction between destroying an android and murdering a human being? The problem is that android design has advanced to the point where only a highly trained specialist is capable of distinguishing them from humans. Instead, we are given an entertaining adventure story featuring Harrison Ford as a bounty hunter assigned to eliminate a band of renegade androids. Only minimal hints remain of Dick's musings on the ultimate impossibility of verifying your own identity, or even your own existence. Faced with the problem of adapting Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," Hampton Fancher and David Peoples elected, probably wisely, to drop back and punt, creating a film that owes at least as much to Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" (1965) as to Dick's novel. Dick is one of those writers whose best work is more philosophical than dramatic, which makes his books fiendishly difficult to adapt for the screen.
Here are a few more such titles to look for on home video. As we saw last week, however, plenty of earlier films have also toyed with this concept. The latest piece of popular fiction to engage the question of what it means to be human by way of a pseudo-human character is the recently released "Stealth," in which a computer-based Naval aircraft flight controller develops a mind of its own, with calamitous results. Frankenstein's monster could not think himself fully human without companionship, the one thing that was forever denied him. For Pinocchio, it was autonomy (no strings) that was lacking.
Among other things, such stories prompt us to ponder a fascinating question: if an animate being looks more or less humanoid and has the power of articulate speech, what else is required for it to be considered fully human? The Tin Man felt that the capacity to feel deep emotion (a heart) would make the crucial difference. From Pinocchio to Frankenstein's monster to the Tin Man of Oz, we have long been fascinated by stories about artificially constructed facsimiles of humanity and their desire to become fully human.
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