Kindle. Well, quite by accident I found myself reading more ruminations on empathy. What Ridley Scott turned into mere background psychobabble in Bladerunner is fleshed out here; I prefer his patricide and other narrative strengthenings to Dick's amateur musings. I tried to hold firm to the hypothesis that Deckard was an android (let's posit a Nexus 7) and it mostly hangs together, at least if you allow for implanted memories. (Then again, with those and a sketchy narrator, anything goes.) The key technological development over the Nexus 6 is, of course, empathy, but of an overly general, unfocussed sort; cue the Nexus 8. There's a lot of respect shown to animals here, which implies vegetarianism, but apparently no-one eats so we don't actually know.
I found it strange that androids are held to be certainly lacking in empathy but that they still clump together, as if they have a herd instinct. Are these therefore somehow the same, but operating at different evolutionary/consciousness levels/stages?