Philip K. Dick — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Philip K. Dick — On AI. 26 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Aesthetics of the Smooth
Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis of the cultural trajectory toward frictionlessness — a smoothness that conceals the labor and struggle that gave previous work its depth.
Consciousness
The quality of subjective experience — being aware, being something it is like to be — and the single deepest unanswered question in both philosophy of mind and AI.
Electric Sheep
The central metaphor of Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — a mechanical animal indistinguishable from the real thing to everyone except its owner, representing the corrosion that occurs when convincing simulation replaces authentic …
Entropy
The second law of thermodynamics' universal tendency toward disorder — Wiener's fundamental antagonist, the force against which every act of intelligence is a local and temporary resistance.
Human-AI Collaboration
The operational frame in which a human and an AI system share a workflow as partners with complementary capabilities — the alternative to both "AI as tool" and "AI as replacement."
Information Ecosystem Crisis
The structural degradation of the shared evidentiary environment on which democratic deliberation depends — caused by the sequential failures of television, social media, and now generative AI.
Kipple
Dick's term for the entropic accumulation of useless objects that fills every unoccupied space — a diagnostic for the digital debris now filling repositories, inboxes, and training datasets in the age of zero-cost AI generation.
Model Collapse
The progressive deterioration of AI output quality when models are trained on their own previous output rather than on fresh human creative work — the informational equivalent of soil depletion.
Nested Counterfactuals
The recursive structure of The Man in the High Castle — an alternate-history novel containing a novel that describes a different alternate history — that Dick used to destabilize the distinction between actual and counterfactual reality.
Technical Debt
Ward Cunningham's 1992 metaphor for the cost of expedient decisions in software — now reshaped by AI into a new variant: the debt of implicit decisions that were never evaluated against a consistent design.
The Android Mind
Dick's term for the mode of consciousness that processes without feeling — the inability to make exceptions, to respond to the specific, to be genuinely affected by experience — a condition that can afflict biological humans as readily as…
The Attention Economy
The economic system in which human attention is harvested, packaged, and sold to advertisers — the infrastructure that drives the algorithmic pathologies Gore calls artificial insanity.
The Laparoscopic Surgery Transition
The 1987–1997 transformation of abdominal surgery from hand-based to camera-mediated practice — Collins's paradigmatic case of technology-driven expertise transformation, and the closest historical parallel to the current AI transition in …
Turing Test
Alan Turing's 1950 proposal to replace the unanswerable question "can machines think?" with a testable question about conversational indistinguishability — the most-cited fictional device in the philosophy of AI.
Claude Code
Anthropic's command-line coding agent — the specific product through which the coordination constraint shattered in the winter of 2025, reaching $2.5B run-rate revenue within months.
Half-Life Technology
The fictional cold-storage preservation of consciousness in Ubik — allowing the recently dead to persist in a twilight state — that becomes Dick's framework for examining systems that maintain informational coherence against entropy.
Large Language Models
Neural networks trained on internet-scale text that have, since 2020, demonstrated emergent linguistic and reasoning capabilities — in Whitehead's vocabulary, computational systems whose prehensions of the textual corpus vastly exceed any i…
Rhetorizor
The text-generation machine in Dick's 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth that accepts topic prompts and produces polished persuasive prose — a fictional device that anticipated large language models by sixty years.
Scramble Suit
The identity-concealing device in A Scanner Darkly that projects a constantly shifting composite of human features over the wearer's actual appearance — Dick's metaphor for the split self produced under conditions of surveillance and the…
The Philip K. Dick Android Head
The 2005 conversational android built by David Hanson, trained on Dick's complete writings, that held conversations convincingly enough to create the uncanny sensation of speaking with a dead man — then was lost on a plane, never to be rec…
Voigt-Kampff Test
The fictional empathy detector in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that measures involuntary physiological responses to emotionally provocative scenarios — a test that asks not whether a being can perform humanness but whethe…
Simulacra and Simulation
Baudrillard's 1981 masterwork — the book that introduced the taxonomy of the orders of simulacra, defined hyperreality, and posed the inverted Borges fable that became the organizing image of his entire framework. The single most influen…
The Exegesis (Philip K. Dick)
Dick's eight-thousand-page handwritten exploration of the VALIS experience — a theological, philosophical, and psychological inquiry of staggering intensity that refuses resolution and insists that the asking is the answer.
The Trivandrum Training
The February 2026 week-long training session in which Edo Segal flew to Trivandrum, India, to work alongside twenty of his engineers as they adopted Claude Code — producing the twenty-fold productivity multiplier documented in The Orange Pill…
The VALIS Experience
Dick's February 1974 encounter with what he described as a beam of information from an external intelligence — an experience that produced eight years of theological and philosophical inquiry and the question: can information itself be ali…