The arrival of ChatGPT has placed artificial intelligence at the center of US discourse. Not surprisingly, one touchstone for these debates have been the novels of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. As it happens, this AI-inspired interest in the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, among many other visionary works, comes at a time when American policy elites are also gripped by a new urban malaise—another constant motif in Dick’s body of work.
Today, this pair of Dickian concerns—the rise of the AI era and urban decline—are assigned different weights by the left and the right. So far, it’s mostly progressive institutions like The New York Times sounding the alarm about the risks of unhindered AI. The mostly libertarian-inflected right, by contrast, has taken a predictable “Let it rip!” attitude, the better to punish coastal liberals whose “bullshit jobs” are threatened by platforms like ChatGPT.
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