Fragments | Ok, So Who the Heck Was Philip K. Dick? — Ep. 06

A Research Rabbit Hole

I'm Robert Barber. Welcome to Fragments. Normally, this is where I tell you what Fragments is and why I do these little stories between the full episodes. But I'm going to skip all of that today because I really want to tell you about this guy. After I finished writing the Philip K. Dick episode, I did something I probably shouldn't have done. I kept researching. Not because I thought I'd miss something important. The episode was finished. I'd spent days reading about this guy, trying to understand what happened to him in 1974 and why, three years later, he stood in front of an audience in France and told them that he believed we might be living in a computer-programmed reality. I had the story. I could have just closed the browser tabs and moved on, but I didn't. I just kept reading. And I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever become this fascinated with anything I've researched for this show. Because every time I thought I understood Philip K. Dick, I'd find something else and think, wait, what? And eventually I realized there was this entire side of him that I barely touched in the episode. So that's what I want to talk about.

Who Philip K. Dick Was

Because even if you've never read a Philip K. Dick novel in your life, there's a pretty good chance you already know his work. You just may not know that you know it. So who the heck was Philip K. Dick? Well, he was a science fiction writer. And that description is technically accurate in about the same way that saying Steven Spielberg makes movies is technically accurate. Dick spent decades writing stories about artificial people, false memories, alternate realities, surveillance, identity, technology, and people slowly discovering that the world around them isn't quite what they thought it was. And he wrote a lot, dozens of novels, more than a hundred short stories. Some of them became famous in their own right. Others became famous in a way Dick himself probably never could have imagined.

The Movies You Already Know

Because if the name Philip K. Dick doesn't immediately mean anything to you, these probably will. Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. That's Philip K. Dick. It's based on his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which happens to be one of my favorite movies, Philip K. Dick. That came from a short story called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, published in 1966. And Minority Report starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg, Philip K. Dick again. The original story was published in 1956. And those are just the obvious ones. That was the point where I started realizing just how much of Philip K. Dick's imagination had already worked its way into modern culture without me really noticing it. And then I started looking at the dates. That's where it gets even more interesting. Because these weren't ideas he came up with in the 80s or the 90s, and Hollywood immediately turned them into movies. The story behind Minority Report was published in 1956. For those of you keeping track, that's 70 years ago. The story behind Total Recall came out in 1966. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became Blade Runner, came out in 1968. And Philip K. Dick died in 1982. He was only 53. Blade Runner came out just a few months after his death. So Dick never got to see what was about to happen to his work. He never saw Arnold Schwarzenegger become Douglas Quaid. He never saw Tom Cruise chasing people for crimes they hadn't committed yet. And he never saw how many people would eventually discover his ideas through movies and television. He never got to see

Memory, Identity, And AI Fears

how deeply those ideas were going to work their way into popular culture. And once I realized that, and I started looking less at the movies themselves and more at what all these stories were actually about, because there are patterns. In Total Recall, you have a man who can't trust his own memories. In Blade Runner, you're asking what separates an artificial person from a real one, and what being human actually means in the first place. With everything going on right now with AI, those questions are more relevant than ever. In Minority Report, you've got a system that can supposedly predict what someone is going to do before they do it, and a government willing to act on that prediction. Over and over again, Dick comes back to the same kinds of questions. Can you trust your memories? Can you trust what you're seeing? Can you trust the people controlling the information around you? What happens when technology gets good enough to blur the line between something artificial and something real? And maybe the biggest question of all, how do you know that the reality you're experiencing is actually what you think it is? Now, I want to be careful here. I'm not saying Philip K. Dick predicted artificial intelligence. I'm not saying he predicted modern surveillance or algorithms or deep fakes. That's an easy trap to fall into when you look backward at science fiction. It's kind of like assuming that the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, predicted the technology that we have today. But I am saying that some of the questions he was asking don't sound nearly as much like science fiction anymore. We live in a world now where a computer can create an image of a person who never existed. Think about that. An image of a person who never had an image because they didn't exist. And yet you can look at it. It can reproduce someone's voice. It can generate video that looks real. Algorithms are constantly trying to predict what we're going to click on, what we're going to buy, and what we're going to watch along with what we might do next. Our movements can be tracked, our behavior can be analyzed. And artificial intelligence has gotten good enough that we're having very real conversations about what happens when we can no longer immediately tell whether something was created by a human being. Again, Philip K. Dick didn't predict all of that. But he was asking questions about the boundary between authentic and artificial when computers were still enormous machines most people would never even see. And that's where I started wondering more about the man himself.

Genius, Paranoia, Or Both

Because depending on what you read about Philip K. Dick, you'll encounter very different versions of him. He was brilliant. He was a visionary. He was paranoid. He was unstable. He was a genius. He was crazy. And sometimes you'll find several of those descriptions in the same article. It actually reminds me of a line from one of my other favorite movies, where Dan Aykroyd says, I mean, the architect was either a certified genius or an authentic wacko. If you know what movie that's from, let me know. But that really is the strange thing about Dick. The further we get from his lifetime, the harder it becomes to dismiss the questions that he was asking simply because they sounded strange. And there's another part of this that I can't stop thinking about. All of those questions about reality, they didn't start in 1974. That matters. Philip K. Dick had already spent years writing about people who discovered the world around them wasn't what they thought it was. He wrote about unreliable memories, artificial people, alternate realities, hidden systems controlling ordinary life. People who suddenly realized that something underneath the surface of their world was very different from what they'd believed. And then something happened to Philip K. Dick. Not one of his characters, him.

1974 Experiences And A Tease

In 1974, Dick began having a series of experiences that he couldn't explain. And I'm deliberately not going to tell that story here, because that's the story I told in the full Philip K. Dick episode of State of the Unknown. So episode 65, the one right behind this one. If you're listening to this fragment and you haven't heard that episode yet, I really think you should. Because once you know what Philip K. Dick said happened to him in 1974, everything I've just told you starts to feel a little different. This was a man who had spent years imagining people discovering that reality wasn't what they thought it was. And then he became convinced that something like that had happened to him. He spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out what it all meant. Was it religious, psychological, neurological? Was some kind of intelligence communicating with him? Was reality itself somehow different from what we normally perceive? Dick considered different possibilities. He changed his mind. He contradicted himself. He wrote thousands of pages trying to work it out. And he never found an answer that completely satisfied him. That's what eventually led him to that stage in Metz France in 1977 and to the statement I opened the full episode with. We are living in a computer programmed reality. If you want to know what happened between the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and the man who was willing to stand in front of an audience and say something like that, go listen to episode 65, because I'm not going to spoil it here.

Did He See The Future?

But there's one last thing I keep coming back to. Philip K. Dick didn't live to see the world we're living in now. He didn't see artificial intelligence doing the things it's doing. He didn't see synthetic voices or generated images. He didn't see smartphones tracking our locations or algorithms learning our behavior. He didn't see Blade Runner become one of the most influential science fiction films ever made. He didn't see generations of people returning to the same questions he'd been asking decades earlier. Maybe that's all this is. Maybe Philip K. Dick was simply an extraordinarily imaginative man who was very, very good at looking at the world around him and asking where it might lead. And honestly, that's remarkable enough. But after spending this much time reading about him, and especially after learning what happened to him in 1974, I can't stop wondering did Philip K. Dick really just make all of this up? Or was he somehow seeing a future the rest of us simply haven't gotten to yet?