The Android and the Human is a speech given by science-fiction author Philip K. Dick at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, taking place at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

in December 1972. It was subsequently published in the fanzine SF Commentary, issue 31. In it the author examines the psychology of humanity as seen through the lens of technology, and vice versa. Dick compares the way that modern technology is animated by mechanism or computation with the way that, according to sociology, primitive man imagines reality itself to be "alive": Rocks, clouds, and the rest of his environment seeming full of hidden motivation, often replete with malice or benevolence. As man advances, intellectually, he comes to the point where he questions that magical world of superstition, coming to only see life where it actually is, scientifically. In fact he can become

solipsist Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known ...

about whether there is any life outside of his own thoughts: ''

Cogito, ergo sum The Latin , usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am", is the "first principle" of René Descartes's philosophy. He originally published it in French as , in his 1637 ''Discourse on the Method'', so as to reach a wider audien ...

''. But with modern automation, people can be drawn back into the intellectually primitive world of

animism Animism (from Latin: ' meaning 'breath, Soul, spirit, life') is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct Spirituality, spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things—Animal, animals, Plant, plants, Ro ...

, where life appears to be in places sound reason says it is not. This was apparent even in 1972, years before

Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera People *Alexa (name), a given name and ...

Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questio ...

. What's more, that technological illusion of life is being created by human beings, who therefore project their own biases and views onto it, so that this impression of animism is a mirror held up to humanity itself: Dick analogizes this to androids, describing such a device as "a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves". In fact, Dick even claims that a person who lacks the ethics, empathy, and sincerity that are seen as defining humanity can be considered an android: "a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way."PHILIP K. DICK ON SEX BETWEEN HUMANS AND ANDROIDS
/ref> Among the androids of modern society, Dick addresses the unethical behavior of the

police state A police state describes a state where its government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the exe ...

, giving examples of what would someday be called the

surveillance society Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizati ...

. One such being the way checkpoints justified to prevent mass shootings in libraries had almost immediately come to be used as a means of generating false probable cause to search people for drugs. Contrasted with this is the hope that Philip holds for the youth who are used to the police state, and yet resisting it via

civil disobedience Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government (or any other authority). By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hen ...

References

Philip K. Dick {{technology-stub