FIR Reading Blog #9

Title: The Electric Ant, 1969 from the book "Decades of Science Fiction"

Author: Philip K. Dick

Date: August 24, 2010

No. of Pages: 9 pages

Time alloted in reading: 4 hours

Summary

Garson Poole is physically an electric ant, possesses the mental attributes of the human. The struggle to retain these human qualities is the mark of the true human in the "Electric Ant." Like the human, the android must have these very qualities if they are to fulfill their particular function. They must be able to correct their mistakes and to creatively engage with new situations. It is imperative that they act as autonomous beings. It is the act of choosing one goal out of many that helps to create identity. Poole is treated like a person and is unaware, until his accident, of his true nature as an "electric ant." It is his treatment and his memories of his pre- accident experiences as a "human" that help to drive his search for a true sense of himself and reality. The electric ants are designed to function along side humans, but they were programmed not to notice or know they are robots. Furthermore, Poole is not the first electric ant that has accidentally discovered his true nature. Poole is but one of many electric ants who accidentally find out their true identities.

Insight

Poole was designed and constructed for a purpose that was not of his choosing, but now that he knows his true nature, he ponders the concept of decision. He probably never gave his ability to make decisions much thought before, because being human grants one the right to make their own decisions. Since he realizes that his ability to make decisions in the past was an illusion, that the ability becomes very important to him. I sympathize for Poole because he is the true "human" in the story. Even though, he is an android, he is more human than the actual humans around him. The story presents us how human being are being reduced to a commodity/ robot and everything he does has a value. It reflects reality in contemporary life or modern society. The human values in the story is compassion, sympathy rather than commodification or materialistic and there is "sense of justice." So it makes us question, "What makes a human being human?"