Imagine, if you will, an adjacent possible world in which Sony's Aibo line of personal robotic pets were as successful as Sony's Walkman line of portable music players. Considering the enormous, nearly immeasurable impacts that portable music players had since they were introduced in the world in the early 1980s, imagine hard into this speculation. Imagine the thriving confusing unexpected ecosystems and marketplaces that would live in and around personal robotics.\nPerhaps AI would have come into existence in support of robotics — one perhaps not as driven by the LLM hypothesis, but nevertheless, in its own way, as perplexing bewildering and triggering as the moment we are living through in the mid-2020s.\nIn such a world, would it be surprising to find a kind of mass-market 'how-to' that revealed, perhaps in a pop-psychology Adam Grant archetype, the nature of our companion species' psyches? Would this have been P.K. Dick's writing? Would P.K. Dick be the Adam Grant of this adjacent temporality? This book is a collaboration between Julian Bleecker, Jed Berk (illustrations), Midjourney, and ChatGPT. A Design Fiction artifact that we found in a hasty jump in the Near Future Laboratory's janky time machine over to this adjacent world. When we got to the checkout lane of a Smart & Final supermarket — we found this book, 'Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and brought it back with us as material cultural evidence of the implications of a world in which precisely this happened. (It seems.)

This project accomplished at least four goals. The first goal attained was to force a deep-dive into the hoopla around ChatGPT. That is, a longitudinal project that took the form of 'co-authoring' long-form material with ChatGPT. I just wanted to see what that felt like and what the outcome would feel like in the hand.\nThe second goal attained was to introduce more Design Fiction artifacts — or artifacts from possible futures or 'adjacent now's', an idiom my friend Tony Dunne offered during a walk one day. This goal of having *more* artifacts available in the world serves the goal of providing an increasing number of examplars that offer increasing evidence of the value of creating material cultural artifacts. The more futures artifacts I am able to offer on the Near Future Laboratory Shop of Futures Artifacts, the more durable the practice of Design Fiction will become. Or so I believe.\nThe third goal attained was to represent the plausibility that entire worlds are made from and through culture. Considering the Sony Walkman — and portable music in general — as an exceptionally, immeasurably profound implication of a twist of fate forces us to consider that entire worlds are shaped and reshaped by the most humble of insertions, quirks, swerves and encounters. And thus we can consider that worlds can be made, remade, and unmade with similar effect through imagination and will.\nThe fourth goal was to follow an brief moment of what felt like inspiration, as far as it would go without stopping and without giving up. The idea of this book and the world around it — the sheep, the refashioned brands, the adjacent almost game-like world — happened in a short conversation and it felt like it should be 'a thing'. And so it has become.