I am being facetious about this, I suppose, but — the point is not merely a humorous one. Our electronic constructs are becoming so complex that to comprehend them we must now reverse the analogizing of cybernetics and try to reason from our own mentation and behavior to theirs — although I suppose to assign motive or purpose to them would be to enter the realm of paranoia; what machines do may resemble what we do, but certainly they do not have intent in the sense that we have; they have tropisms, they have purpose in the sense that we build them to accomplish certain ends and to react to certain stimuli. A pistol, for example, is built with the purpose of firing a metal slug that will damage, incapacitate, or kill someone, but this does not mean that the pistol wants to do this. And yet there we are entering the philosophical realm of Spinoza when he saw, and I think with great profundity, that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, “I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.” Free will for us — that is, when we feel desire, when we are conscious of wanting to do what we do — may be even for us an illusion; and depth psychology seems to substantiate this: Many of our drives in life originate from an unconscious that is beyond our control. We are as driven as are insects, although the term “instinct” is perhaps not applicable for us. Whatever the term, much of our behavior that we feel is the result of our will, may control us to the extent that for all practical purposes we are falling stones, doomed to drop at a rate prescribed by nature, as rigid and predictable as the force that creates a crystal. Each of us may feel himself unique, with an intrinsic destiny never before seen in the universe. . . and yet to God we may be millions of crystals, identical in the eyes of the Cosmic Scientist.
And — here is a thought not too pleasing — as the external world becomes more animate, we may find that we — the so-called humans — are becoming, and may to a great extent always have been, inanimate in the sense that we are led, directed by built-in tropisms, rather than leading. So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-Other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White’s beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.
I would like, then, to ask this: What is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include in this the kind of pseudohuman behavior exhibited by what were once living men — creatures who have, in ways I wish to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me analogues of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life continues, metabolism goes on, the soul — for lack of a better term — is no longer there or is at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world — it always did, but the production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and suchlike agencies now. The reduction of humans to mere use — men made into machines, serving a purpose that although “good” in the abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal — however puny — destiny. As if, so to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in — and trained in — the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented themselves, in such a way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary, or at least desirable, method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal.
I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about one or another party of the Europe of his time, “They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.” And it is the “dying bird” that I am concerned with. The dying — and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity — the dying bird of authentic humanness.
That is what I wish to say to you here, today. I wish to disclose my hope, my faith, in the kids who are emerging now. Their world, their values. And, simultaneously, their imperviousness to the false values, the false idols, the false hates of the previous generations. The fact that they, these fine, good kids, cannot be reached or moved or even touched by the “gravity” — to refer back to my previous metaphor — that has made us older persons fall, against our knowledge or will, at thirty-two feet per second throughout our lives. . . while believing that we desired it.
It is as if these kids, or at least many of them, some of them, are falling at a different rate, or, really, not falling at all. Walt Whitman’s “Marching to the sound of other drummers” [this phrase, inexactly quoted, in fact belongs to Henry David Thoreau] might be rephrased this way: falling, not in response to unexamined, unchallenged, alleged “verities,” but in response to a new and inner — and genuinely authentic — human desire.
Youth, of course, has always tended toward this; in fact, this is really a definition of youth. But right now it is so urgent, if, as I think, we are merging by degrees into homogeneity with our mechanical constructs, step by step, month by month, until a time will perhaps come when a writer, for example, will not stop writing because someone unplugged his electric typewriter but because someone unplugged him. But there are kids now who cannot be unplugged because no electric cord links them to any external power sources. Their hearts beat with an interior, private meaning. Their energy doesn’t come from a pacemaker; it comes from a stubborn, almost absurdly perverse refusal to be “shucked”; that is, to be taken in by the slogans, the ideology — in fact, by any and all ideology itself, of whatever sort — that would reduce them to instruments of abstract causes, however “good.” Back in California, where I came from, I have been living with such kids, participating, to the extent I can, in their emerging world. I would like to tell you about their world because — if we are lucky — something of that world, those values, that way of life, will shape the future of our total society, our utopia or anti-utopia of the future. As a science fiction writer, I must, of course, look continually ahead, always at the future. It is my hope — and I’d like to communicate it to you in the tremendous spirit of optimism that I feel so urgently and strongly — that our collective tomorrow exists in embryonic form in the heads, or rather in the hearts, of these kids who right now, at their young ages, are politically and sociologically powerless, unable even, by our California laws, to buy a bottle of beer or cigarette, to vote, to in any way shape, be consulted about, or bring into existence the official laws that govern them and our society. I think, really, I am saying this: If you are interested in the world of tomorrow you may learn something about it, or at least read about possibilities that may emerge to fashion it, in the pages of Analog and F&SF and Amazing, but actually, to find it in its authentic form, you will discover it as you observe a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kid as he goes about his natural peregrinations, his normal day. Or, as we say in the San Francisco Bay Area, as you observe him “cruising around town to check out the action.” This is what I have found. These kids that I have known, lived with, still know, in California, are my science fiction stories of tomorrow, my summation, at this point of my life as a person and a writer; they are what I look ahead to — and so keenly desire to see prevail. What, more than anything else I have ever encountered, I believe in. And would give my life for. My full measure of devotion, in this war we are fighting, to maintain, and augment, what is human about us, what is the core of ourselves and the source of our destiny. Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings. Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimages there. Our natures will be going there, too. Ad astra — but per hominum. [To the stars — but as men.] And we must never lose sight of that.