PKD@Biltmore1972/2016: Sci-fi writer Philip Kindred Dick outside the Biltmore Hotel where he delivered his rambling paper The Android and the Human in 1972 at VCON2 sci-fi conference.

This was a postscript of sorts to his 1968 short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - famously adapted into 1982/2017 films Blade Runner/Blade Runner 2049. The Biltmore in 2016 is a homeless hostel.

"[androids, meaning]... artificial constructs masquerading as humans. Usually with a sinister purpose in mind. I suppose I took it for granted that if such a construct, a robot for example, had a benign or anyhow decent purpose in mind, it would not need to so disguise itself. Now, to me, that theme seems obsolete. The constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already." - Dick, The Android and the Human

Shortly after delivering the speech, Dick suffered a mental breakdown and checked in to X-Kalay, a rehab community set up for indigenous ex-con addicts that practiced a version of the Synanon therapetic model, based on Carl Rogers' encounter therapy, and strictly abstinence-based rehab. Dick's experience at X-Kalay was paranoidly fictionalised in his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly.