“We” Think We Are Philip K. Dick: Precarity, Futurity, and the Frontiers of Humanity

Abstract Through a critical reading of Ken Liu’s short story “The Caretaker,” Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” and Andrey Junkovsky’s Russian science fiction Netflix series “Better Than Us” (2018), this essay probes the long-held assumption that moral sentiments are uniquely human as well as the enlightenment vision of the world that feeds today’s mutations of capitalism, sovereignty, and the related techno-feudal and techno-liberal fantasies about “machine-induced human obsolescence.” Heeding the insights from Laurence Rickel’s reading of Philip K. Dick’s future worlds in his book, ‘I Think I am Philip K. Dick,’ we offer a productive reading of Dick’s fiction to illustrate how the more-than-human world, future forms of precarity, and “existential pluralism” that Dick anticipated in his speculative fiction raises critical questions about the futures of labor, futures of reason, affect, power, and the new frontiers of humanity. Together, these texts demonstrate how empathy works to value and order human-human and human-non-human relations in present and near future worlds. They also illustrate how international, domestic, human, and more-than-human relations are being reconfigured by corporate power and robotic relations in a world where some robots perform menial tasks while others, owing to their advanced capacities and the dynamics of robot ethics, work as caregivers, sex bots, care bots, beggar aides, or domestic workers.