The Android and the Human

Today, Emmet Penney, host of ex.haust, and I discussed PKD's sprawling 1972 speech from the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, "The Android and the Human."

I encourage everyone read the whole piece here, but it's perhaps best summed up by the following quote:

Our environment — and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components — all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves...Rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to.

Read it here.