"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 in December 1972.
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.
[2] 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: 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[3]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".
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.