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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson
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| Voight-Kampff Empathy Test | ||
| A test consisting of a set of images and questions, asked while the subject's biometric data are gathered; intended to separate humans from non-humans. |
The Voight-Kampff test attempts to distinguish androids from human beings by autonomic responses to questions that should elicit an empathic response. Because it seeks to gather and measure biological information for security purposes, the empathy testing procedure is a kind of biometric identification system.
| "I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voight-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments... "This" - he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires - "measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response... This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. |
| From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1968 Additional resources -
|
(From Harrison Ford Gives The Test)
The history of tests to distinguish human beings from machines is short, but interesting. Alan Turing devised what is commonly known as the Turing Test; the crux of the test is language usage.
It is intriguing to note that Dick has vacated the field from the standpoint of trying to defend human intelligence versus machine intelligence; he relies on emotional response. Biometric data are also used to authenticate the person being tested. At the time the novel was written, computers were able to play chess, but poorly. (Turing himself wrote the first chess program in 1950, using a limited size board and fewer pieces. Claude Shannon published the first article on the subject, outlining how a computer would evaluate and choose positions. Chess programs reached Grand Master status by 1988.)
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and Technology from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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Tech news articles related to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Voight-Kampff Empathy Test-related
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- Is Your Candidate Human?
- Portable MRI Scans For Psychopathy Like Voight-Kampff
- Emotion Detector Like PKD's Voight-Kampff Empathy Test
- SimSensei Plus Kinnect Equals PKD's Voight-Kampff?
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'... with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way the whole length of Rama's six artificial suns.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface...'
'the human seats took up two-thirds of the room in each'
'the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits...'
'Over her lacerated right shoulder he sprayed art-derm...'
Now, that was a Pontiac Trans Am with some real style.
'There is a built-in microphone that hears everything you say, and an electric brain that selects a suitable answer.'
