>It's curious and unexpected that an actor in a major movie wrote a scene for it, hence a relevant submission.
Ryan Gosling is literally the least interesting aspect of this article, and his involvement is the least worth discussing.
It's relevant because of the intellectual merit of the ideas presented, the philosophy behind the Voight-Kampf test, the nature of humanity, virtual humanity, culture, etc, which originate from Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner. The difference in the way the book, original screenplay and sequel approach the question of testing who or what is and isn't human, in a world where general artificial intelligence is ubiquitous.
Unfortunately the title doesn't reflect any of that, and makes it seem like a celebrity piece. That's the part good hackers find interesting. It would have been better without any mention of the actor whatsoever.
The fact that it's Ryan Gosling specifically is largely irrelevant. The fact that it was K's actor who wrote that particular scene is integral to the point the article is making.
A hacker liked Bladerunner enough to post that Ryan Gosling, an actor, wrote a scene. Like a coder writing a marketing pitch. You never know where good activity will get you.
If you haven’t read Pale Fire, I really highly recommend it. It is really two stories in one: a wonderful epic poem about love and loss, and also a heartbreaking tale of about a sad, lonely guy who lives off his grandiose delusions. The two stories are intertwined through a neat device. It’s very good.
It is great, but, having read it before I saw 2049, I found references to it in the film pretentious. The article says that '"Pale Fire", like BR2049, is a story about a man who comes to the false conclusion that he is the protagonist of someone else's story.' This isn't what it's about and the interpretation in the film is one you could get from reading the first few lines of the poem the book contains but no other material.
This article was a strange read for me. The author claims to "really" (no, really) like Blade Runner 2049, and then admits that he hasn't read the novel upon which the film's universe is based, didn't know that a key scene in the movie was quoting a novel until recently, and did not read the quoted novel either.
I wouldn't claim to like the movie as much as the author did, let alone write an article about, but I do like the movie a lot: I saw it three times in theaters (and it's long!). I read a bit of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" before getting bored, and have not read "Pale Fire", but I did recognize during my first watch that the lines of the baseline test were obviously a quotation, and the "Pale Fire" references were mentioned in just about every single movie review and discussion (because they were a bit ham-fisted).
I guess I just don't understand how you could enjoy a piece of art so much, (and write articles about it!) without first checking out the art that it's based off of, the art that it explicitly references, or even reading a small amount of online discussion about it.
> This article was a strange read for me. The author claims to "really" (no, really) like Blade Runner 2049, and then admits that he hasn't read the novel upon which the film's universe is based, didn't know that a key scene in the movie was quoting a novel until recently, and did not read the quoted novel either.
You can really like a piece of art without having or wanting to engage with its source material. Maybe you don't have the time, maybe you enjoy/understand a format more than another. Stating that you have to engage with the source material if you really enjoyed something is just elitism and gatekeeping.
That’s a long read and I’ll have to reread the first sections to understand the differences between the tests in book and film.
Author certainly knows a lot about the Blade Runner universe. Surprised that they think the second film is better. I think most Blade Runner fans see the second as technically excellent but a little cold. Also making Blade Runner’s android nature explicit rather than implied, didn’t really advance the story.
While visually stunning, the new one seemed to be missing something. The world didn’t feel as lived in/well worn, the characters didn’t inspire as much ambivalence or pathos.
So I like 2049 better than the first one. I think maybe has to do with I didn't grow up watching the first one, in fact didn't watch until I was an adult. I like the coldness aspect of 2049, and I think what really makes the difference is the Hans Zimmer score. The musical atmosphere is fantastic.
I grew up on Bladerunner, and the Vangelis score is like a part of my being.
I think 2049 was great. I cant say it's better or worse because it's different but it fits and was more than I hoped for. Of course it has problems but so did the first one, and nothing is perfect especially in sci-fi. The Hans Zimmer score is fantastic.
I thought the Hans Zimmer score was only okay, in a pastiche-of-the-original kind of way, but maybe I should give it another chance.
For me the Vangelis score is one of the all-time greatest movie scores, although I’m probably biased from having heard it young. Such a unique and recognisable sound, and just the perfect mood for the film.
I grew up with blade runner and the hardest part to accept was that Han Solo was such a wimp. I didn't return to it until I became interested in Syd Mead.
Pretty sure it was the same summer he got frozen in carbonite.
Interesting. I found 2049 bleak and cold and without any real meaning. Just some well produced scenes without a story. I feel a lot of today's movies are like this.
Yeah, if it has meaning, it's a bit too bleak for my taste.
It feels a little bit like how the "camp" Batman got dirty and gritty in the later movies. If "gritty" is the first order derivative, Bladerunner 2049 took the gritty of Bladerunner and went for the second-order derivative, fatalistic.
Even though I liked 2049 I agree with you, there wasn't much meaning to it. In contrast, in the first movie I was fascinated by the idea of literally travelling to meet your maker if you are not content with the limits of your existence. And of course the cheesy but wonderful monologue by Rutger Hauer.
It would be a far better movie if every scene with Jared Leto was deleted.
Interesting that the score makes the difference, the score from blade runner 1982 is really unique to me and inseparable from the movie. If I hear a single note from it I think about the movie and if I see a frame of the movie, I think about the music. I can't remember a single thing about the 2049 score, except that at the time I thought every interesting part was a shallow clone of the original mashed up with the main theme from Terminator 2 because someone thought it was about robots.
The original Blade Runner score is certainly innovative, and not bad, but I'd argue that it aged very poorly. The synthesizers they used may have sounded futuristic at the time, but watching it today, the soundscape screams "this film created in the early 80s." The use of a purely orchestral score in the Star Wars films is a big reason why they continue to hold up.
Wow, Vangelis' score is the best thing about the original and an epochal masterpiece. Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for the second one is just another Zimmer score, swiftly done to replace Johannsson's work. How different can perceptions be!
Highly recommend reading Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep if this kind of stuff interests you. There's a very important plot point related to all of this with the Empathy Box and Mercerism in the book that's missing from the movies entirely. (FWIW, it was a concept that was maybe unfilmable anyway.)
Mercerism is probably the most bizarre aspect of that book, and fascinating in that way only PKD can manage.
Would you mind explaining mercerism? I’ve read the book and I didn’t really know what was going on.
It’s a religion made up by Androids to control humans?
I don't Mercerism is about androids at all. If you read enough PKD short stories, Mercerism is just another of these cool ideas that appear all over the place.
Like a lot of PKD concepts, it defies a simple explanation (by design). It hits on many of his common themes: consciousness, what it means to be human, the shifting and blurry nature of reality, the merging and melding of different minds, etc.
On its surface, it's a religion based on the Messianic "Wilbur Mercer" character, and the shared vision of him that people can enter through the Empathy Box. But then the book explores whether Mercer, and that shared vision in the Empathy Box, is actually "real" or "fake", in a way that closely mirrors the exploration of androids vs humans.
Basically, the world of Do Androids Dream... kinda sucks. Post-nuclear war, "join the offworld colonies", cyberpunk ghetto, etc.
The Mercer box was something people could use to plug in and feel something, sort of like a Mega Church, rock concert, etc. that moves you; something positive in an otherwise negative place. But it's a programmed feeling, it's not real.
It contrasts with the hunting-and-retiring-androids thing, in that real people can't feel things unless they plug into a program, and are feeling something wholly artificial -- so how is that really any different from the 'droids?
For the curious, Mercerism is first mentioned in PKD's short story "The Little Black Box", where it's an anti-establishment movement and a genuine religion of unknown origin (speculated by the main characters to possibly be of alien origin). In this story, there is no mention of androids.
In Do Androids Dream, PKD seems to have picked up Mercerism as a way to emphasize humankind's capacity for empathy, which androids (replicants) lack. Though the androids claim it's a made up religion if I remember correctly -- but of course they would say that, since they lack empathy and cannot be trusted.
Note the characterization of androids in the novel and of replicants in the movie differs in a fundamental issue: androids are cruel and truly incapable of empathy (it's mentioned that an android doesn't even care about their fellow androids) but replicants in the movie are shown being fully capable of empathy: they love and defend each other. Mercerism is no longer a difference between humans and artificial beings, and maybe that's why it was left out of the movie?
Personally, I think the most interesting aspect about Mercerism in the context of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is the fact that, while it is a way to "emphasize humankind's capacity for empathy", as you've nicely put it, it is also constrained to the empathy box which is labelled as ones most prized possession and an extension of ones body in the book.
Assuming the empathy box is merely an extension of ones self and using it requires obeying a relatively strict process (taking part in Mercer's "martyr walk"), what's left of you as a human being outside of it, is a biomechanical shell not much more capable or understanding of empathy than any android.
I like this article and like this kind of thoughtful analysis of film.
But I don’t like that scene and don’t think it’s a job of good writing. I think it’s cool that Ryan Gosling wrote the scene and that he was able to collaborate with the author and director in that way, but it kind of explains the frailness of the scene.
The problem I have with the scene is that while it looks cool, it seems like the dumbest, most ineffective way of detecting if an android is off baseline. It would be simple for a trained android or human to fake the test just like a polygraph and seems easier for an android to control expression of emotion and just match the expectation.
I expect a real test would just dump data via a port like our cars’ diagnostic port and quickly run against a trained model for what is conformant behavior vs aberrant (of course testing for manipulation, deletion, or unusual data).
This scene replicates the biggest flaw of the movie, it all looks cool but makes no logical sense. And it’s about societal systems and robots so there should be logic or at least attempts at logic. Corporations and fascist governments and religions at least seem to attempt order.
The movie seems like an artists attempt to write about robots without really thinking about how things would work. PKD did this so much in the source material.
But it looks cool and I enjoy watching so I don’t get hung up on it, but wouldn’t call it out as great writing. I’ve got problems with the original as well but still enjoy it (and it has Daryl Hannah and Sean Young so that’s awesome).
I can also calmly explain I didn't turn the turtle on its back, but then again, I'm not a replicant. So maybe judging a test humans are SUPPOSED to pass, but for replicants it's viable baseline test is not a good measure.
Also a realistic test would be terrible cinematic experience. Long, technical, boring, trite... The scene is meant to be accepted symbolically, not literally.
Right. It's visually jarring, kind of stressful. It's part of a long sequence of shots of crappy things the replicant has to deal with. It may not be a reasonable test, but it's meant to show submission and mental coherence in the face of all the horrible treatment he endures. Later, he doesn't do very well and we get to see Ryan act out some cognitive dissonance.
> The scene is meant to be accepted symbolically, not literally.
This is key. The purpose of the scene is to establish within 30 seconds what K's relationship is to the agency he works for, and by some extension, to the rest of the society he lives in. And the scene is brilliantly effective at accomplishing that task.
I suppose some of it mirrors the way «government testing» such as polygraphs, etc often are just designed to filter out non conforming personalities, even if the tests lack any scientific backing of their effectiveness
> I expect a real test would just dump data via a port like our cars’ diagnostic port and quickly run against a trained model for what is conformant behavior vs aberrant (of course testing for manipulation, deletion, or unusual data).
Replicants are not robots. They do not have ports.
> The movie seems like an artists attempt to write about robots without really thinking about how things would work.
Exactly. They're biological. They're genetically human. If they were robots the VK test in the first film would have been a quick x-ray to see if the subject is made out of metal.
Robots don’t have to be made of metal. I’m using the term in that they are artificial humanoids that are created and programmed.
I think these are distinct from some purely biological humanoid that is the result of genetic engineering where it was evolved and gene hacked toward some purpose.
I am calling replicants robots in that they are manufactured out of their goopsacks or whatever and the designers have a lot of precise leeway over what and how they design them vs what biology forces them to do. They are etching codes on their eyeballs so I figured they could have some memory audit function and a way to extract that memory and thus a way to analyze a segment of time for aberration.
> Replicants are not robots. They do not have ports.
This is a design flaw and sort of what I mean. I’m supposed to believe they have this synthetic organism so precise they can program lifespans and implant memories and don’t have a better way to debug it? Of course anything is possible as it’s fiction, but this is part of my belief is that they thought of something that looked cool and backed into the reasoning (ie, this Shakespeare memorization technique looks cool so they wrote this movie rationale of how this was precise and scientific [or at least the in movie characters think it is]).
The point of that test was to evaluate the replicants in the axis of emotional awareness, to see if they are aware of all the things they are missing. This short video explains it better [1].
It really isn't easy for humans to fake such kind of tests, and if you know a person long enough, you can read their emotions, you can catch subtle changes in vocal tone, spacing between words, changes in the language they use, and even micro-expressions.
Not to mention that the evaluation went deeper than a simple camera as evidenced by the screen madam was looking at at the time of the failed test. It clearly showed something inside K like biological markers of emotions?
Do androids in the bladerunner universe even have "ports"? I thought the point was that they are essentially biological robots. If they weren't you wouldn't even need a voight campf test, the fact that they had a port would signify their inhumanity.
They do not have ports. I could have written my comment better as I meant not that the androids had ports that weren’t being used, but that androids are likely to be designed with some port. So if testing like this was necessary, their design would have reflected a better way.
Replicants were not accidental discoveries nor gifted by aliens, they were invented by Tyrell.
Probably that the replicants are fully biological (even if they were created artificially), and physiologically almost impossible to differentiate from a human. Robots in fiction don't typically follow that pattern.
Artificial humans as in they are flesh and blood like biological humans but are engineered. More like the clone troopers from star wars but they are designed to do all sorts of jobs not just soldiers and they aren't direct clones of real people.
Rutger Hauer's character Roy Batty is a soldier replicant. He was made for combat and even talks about it in his tears in the rain speech at the end. Because he's a soldier model he has greater physical features than biological humans. Stronger, tougher etc. He deals with Deckard without trouble.
Another replicant in the film named Pris is described as a "basic pleasure model". I think you can figure that out.
Replicants form a slave underclass in the world of Blade Runner and the Tyrell corp markets and sells them. The replicants in the movie are part of the latest "nexus 6" line. Sounds like smartphones but they were going for a consumer product feel.
Why do we believe replicants have a core of data that can be dumped? Or a debugging port?
Everything I've seen in the movies shows them to be bioengineered, not computer-based. Perhaps even then, reading out the contents of a mind is a destructive process.
They can have memories implanted, and deleted, and changed. So it seemed possible to me to have some form of neural scanning that doesn’t destroy the replicant.
Today there are humans who can train to beat polygraphs. It seems like replicants can train on this much more easily so this test more likely measures if the replicant wants to be found out than is actually off.
I like how the author brings up this is more a flaw in how society is measuring.
There’s a fun game called Inhuman Conditions [0] where players pretend to be an inspector and either a human, passive robot, or angry robot that explorers how to measure this.
In our world there’s brain imaging and it seems likely that in the future there’s going to be some form of non-destructive memory reading.
Replicants are not genetically human. Its within canon, I think, to have the process of creating a replicants be somewhat open loop. Perhaps they encode the beginning neural structure as a virus that's implanted in developing bodies, but otherwise don't have clean ways of interacting directly with brains and minds (that are not destructive - destructive or even expensive reads are also in scope for canon but not likely to be casually used)
> it seems like the dumbest, most ineffective way of detecting if an android is off baseline. It would be simple for a trained android or human to fake the test just like a polygraph and seems easier for an android to control expression of emotion and just match the expectation.
This seems to me like a misunderstanding of the idea behind both films. The baseline test in this scene seems to be set up as a test of one's ability to control emotion.
> It would be simple for a trained android or human to fake the test just like a polygraph
IFF the android or human is organised/prepared/together/emotionally settled. i.e. "at baseline". Which is the whole point. The test is testing whether you're in the type of state of mind one would need to do things in a controlled & calculated manner: if you can fake it you're at baseline.
> seems easier for an android to control expression of emotion
And if you think this, you didn't get the general message behind the films*.
---
* Fwiw I have not read Philip K. Dick so I can't say whether the same is true of Do Androids Dream...
> Perhaps. Of course I think, I get it, I just don’t agree with it, or think it’s poorly formed.
Sounds like every time I've tried to discuss these movies online. If you notice the setting has issues, for some reason a lot of people jump on that as you "just not getting it" and you absolutely hating the movies.
It's definitely a thing online for people to roll out the "you just don't get it" line in response to a negative review of a piece of media, but I thought it a little more applicable here in discussing whether 1 scene - written by one person - fits thematically with the rest of the film(s) written by other people.
As in: the issue raised with Gosling's writing is that it's portrayal of androids' emotionality is not in line with the rest of the film(s). But to me that's one of the primary themes of both films.
Yes but it's more than challenging to do it technically correctly and not lose 99.9999% of the non-ML experts audience wondering what was all that about and why done in that way.
The whole thing in the Blade Runner world is that you can't tell the difference between a human and a replicant with a physical examination. That's the whole point why they have the Voight-Kampff in the first movie instead of just checking if Rachael has a DATA PORT.
In 2049 they _know_ that K is a replicant, but they need to detect whether he is getting too emotional to be reliable. Again, no data port. He's biologically human, but not mentally.
> The whole thing in the Blade Runner world is that you can't tell the difference between a human and a replicant with a physical examination.
You can, but only through a very intrusive bone marrow analysis. It's mentioned (in either the movie or the novel) that they were hours into an autopsy before they realized it was a replicant.
VK is the alternative when you don't want to subject a suspect to dangerous and intrusive surgery.
To be honest I was referring to the original Blade Runner and PKD's novel. I didn't like the sequel much (and I didn't think it needed to be made to begin with).
Though I suppose it applies even to the sequel; unless the serial shows up in x-rays you probably need to do surgery to find out!
Again, I understand the logic of the movie, but that’s what I don’t really like that much. Wouldn’t it be more likely that as part of this synthetic org that they include some simple market like setting a specific gene so you just test a skin cell.
Of course picking apart movies leads to cinematic anhedonia, but this is sort of my point. This test exists, in the movie, for REASONS that are a macguffin for cool acting and scenes.
While I agree that it doesn't make a lot of sense even if you understand what's going on, and that what's going on isn't actually very clearly communicated to begin with, I still like it. I like that it's odd and off putting. It's just one of those things, like the door mugger with the hat in The Fifth Element, (or everything else in The Fifth Element), that just stand out and make the whole thing feel a little less paint by numbers.
Sometimes I just think "between cells," "interlinked," for no reason. I only think about it because it's weird.
> “It would be simple for a trained android or human to fake the test just like a polygraph”
This seems like a massive assumption about how the android brain works.
In contemporary terms, it’s like asking: “Surely you can ask ChatGPT to only tell the truth? It’s a computer, it can’t lie.” — when the reality is that it’s exactly the opposite (it’s a computer which only knows how to lie and most of the time it happens to be exactly right).
It seems like a massive assumption to extrapolate the limitations of ChatGPT to the AGI of androids. ChatGPT neither lies (which requires intent) nor tells the truth (which requires knowledge) because it doesn't retain state, and cannot learn from the outside world beyond whatever is provided in a prompt stack.
One can assume an android in the hypothetical future with fully sentient AGI has a mind capable of retaining state and working senses, and thus is complex enough to be capable of willing deception.
I’m not saying the future android would be based on ChatGPT. I’m suggesting it could be based on a model of computation whose capabilities and limitations could be unforeseen and unintuitive to us, in the same way as ChatGPT is something completely different compared to the symbolic fact-based AI systems of decades past.
Someone from the past whose idea of AI is Prolog would have a hard time understanding ChatGPT only based on interactions with it.
Seems like your criticisms are due to your misunderstanding. In the movies replicants aren’t robots. They human constricts but biological. They are closer to lab grown individuals than to mechanical robots with ports and data caches to dump.
And referred to an article on denofgeek.com that talks about the same scene:
"He [Gosling] came up with this process that actors use to learn Shakespeare, where you say a word, then they repeat the word, and then someone would ask a question about that word. It’s to induce specific memories linked with a word, so they remember the word forever. I transformed that process to make it intrusive, where instead of having someone repeating a long, long sentence, they will be more aggressive – they’re asking questions about specific words." - Denis Villeneuve, Director, talking about Gosling
The sad thing about this film is that I remember nothing about it a few years after watching it. Nothing. I have a vague recollection of a desert scene and a rainy one, but no idea what happens or who are the characters. The original one I could have described the plot with detail after twenty years, the time that passed until I rewatched it.
I wonder how much of that is due to increased exposure to content, plus a function of being young when seeing it.
My recollection of 2049 is, an android police officer performs a dirty police job, is there confronted with information which not exactly raises doubts, but questions. The plant, a photo, something the perp/victim said.
Then something about the police station and the relation between human boss and android subordinate officer.
A cold corporate overlord without respect for life. (Slaughter of newborn woman android to demonstrate power.)
Something about rumours of a woman, chase into deserted dust city, something about android living in a factory and "childhood" being fake memories.
And the ending with a budding resistance movement among escaped androids and how they somehow can reproduce on their own now, and not die so young. Harrison Ford turning up, a piano.
Yeah, I can't really make it into a story. I don't want to trash on 2049 because it is somehow very impressive, but I don't like it much. It's very disturbing and I guess that is a quality of its own. I will possibly never watch it again.
There are other movies I will never watch again but which I will say are really, really good, no reservations. 2049 is not one of them.
I wonder how much of that is due to increased exposure to content, plus a function of being young when seeing it.
Not much. That's not the only movie I've seen recently. Not all of them have been so forgettable. An alarming portion of them was. But not all, I can clearly remember many of them, even for series with many episodes, I can tell you what happened in each of them.
But the Starwars sequels, the fourth of Matrix (I liked it though) or anything superheroic (I quit those years ago) are a blank in my memory.
Edit: I believe that good story telling has something in common with spaced repetition. There are some rules that, if followed, make your story indelible. Likeable, relatable characters, a worthy quest a logical plot...
Edit2: The love for flashbacks, that become parallel timelines in their degenerate form is tiresome and now it's very difficult to find a movie without them.
I think you're right regarding the link to spaced repetition. 2049 tries so hard to deliver long, drawn out, cinematic shots that often times are visually impressive but make it almost impossible to repeat a scene or reiterate on a plot point to make a more lasting impression.
Personally, I watched 2049 when it came out and did not remember much of it a year later but upon watching the first movie and 2049 back to back a while ago, I noticed that a lot more stuck with me this time.
The context of the first movie plus especially watching 2049 for a second time and already expecting certain things but noticing different details has made it a lot more memorable for me.
Then again, this is hardly in defense of 2049, since a good movie should aim to deliver this experience in a single runtime but I found it very interesting. There is "a lot there" in 2049, it's just buried under almost an forced form of dark and dramatic cinematography.
There are a lot of factors at play here (for humans in general).
I myself, in my 50s, painfully clearly experience the contrast between the 'automatic recall' of any random stuff from the time of e.g. my early twenties,
with not remembering anything particular happening a few days ago, unless I focus and luck has it something imprinted (wrong word).
In spite of this, I believe I retain significant parts of my 2049 viewing, which I did appreciate, for what a "II Movie" might be.
My main point if any being, my retaining or not retaining stuff from a particular movie has as much and more to do with my state at that given time, than with the movie in question.
Another thing, to my dimmed sensibilities, is that I view Blade Runner as a more 'clear and basic' film (in a positive way)
- "Hunter track down renegade robots".
I cannot as clearly describe 2049, I assume because it was interwoven of many thinner threads, K or not be damned.
I am not saying that one movie has threads and the other not,
but they are 'cut' differently, differently textured.
2049 really laboured it’s ‘noir’ credentials at points and seemed deliberately slow and ponderous.
And the modern Dune seemed like almost a conscious reaction against the visual excesses of the old Dune. It was austere, there seemed little human affection between characters, little emotion. It was just so dry.
One thing I missed from Frank Herbert's work in watching Villeneuve's adaptation was the intimate connection to the characters you get from reading all the dialogue. I suppose a film version is going to cut some things, but Villeneuve takes the other extreme, being so minimal with dialogue, that I felt it unnecessarily suffered here.
I watched Dune back to back with Pig (wherein Nic Cage is looking for his pet pig), and was startled by how I felt basically nothing watching Dune (it would make a good coffee table book) but was reduced to a blubbering mess by Pig.
I haven’t seen them. I’d say “I should get around to that” but my opinions on his films that I have seen make me rather ambivalent about watching more.
I actually quite liked 2049 and Dune. I say this as a fan of the original Blade Runner, Android Sheep, and the novel "Dune."
For 2049, maybe its just my own personal struggles with personal identity and losing people I love, but K's struggles resonated with me. Its a story that mostly says, at least the way I interpreted it, that who you are doesn't matter so much as the actions you perform in life. K, for most of the movie, is doing what other people tell him to do. In the end he takes action and makes choices that are meaningful to him. It results in his death, but it was a choice between either being a dead man walking with no meaning in his life, or finding meaning even if it means dying for it.
I can see why someone might not like it...its slow and it focuses more on the internal struggles of the main character than action on the screen. Still, when I ponder what happens in the movie, it resonates with me and lots of other people. Its pretty much a modern cult classic...did poorly at the box office, but certain types of people(including myself) are crazy about it.
For Dune, I agree it could be a bit dry. I love the book and I was a bit disappointed that the interactions were not as passionate, especially between Paul and his Mother. Still, the cinematography was amazing and they did the best they could IMO. Dune is a slow book that is hard to adapt to the screen so I am quick to forgive it.
I can see why you might like 2049. To me it’s not the introspection and growth of the character that’s its failing, it’s the poignant multi-second shots of a tree root or a bit of ash that felt overly deliberate and designed to seem meaningful while also dragging out the run time.
Yes - I love the books of Dune (well, the Frank Herbert ones) and I find the old movie entertaining and used to obsessively collect different cuts. I enjoyed the sci-fi channel adaptations, though I didn’t much care for their portrayal of Paul and also I probably haven’t watched them in 15 years.
I felt that the lack of interpersonal rapport and affection, along with his choice of palette, just made the whole thing feel sterile and dull.
My fear is that this becomes the definitive Dune for the next few decades, blowing the budget (both literally and metaphorically) for Dune adaptations on a polished though ultimately bland pair of movies.
Agree. I tried watching 2049 a second time and couldn't get through half. I remembered why I didn't like it the first time around - wooden acting, fight scenes that felt far too staged, the excruciating virtual girlfriend scenes, the strange absence of Asian people.
Things that did work: Hans Zimmer's soundtrack, some of the big vistas toward the end.
For anyone asking themselves what PKD is (since it's mentioned in the article and in the comments here without explanation), it's apparently Philip K. Dick, the author of the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", on which Blade Runner is based.
BTW there is also a novel from the 80s called “blade runner”. Don’t read it: it’s really terrible.
Also it has nothing at all to do with androids or anything. IIRC it’s something to do with illegal surgery, or transplants perhaps, but I remember it being so terrible that I don’t even want to go find the book and see.
Whereas Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is subtle and divine — one of PKD’s best and always worth a reread.
> Whereas Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is subtle and Devine
It's also a relatively short read, but packed with so much more to explore than the movie dug into. I really wish Mercerism had been brought into the film. It's such an insightful critique of religion and society, and quite prophetic for time in which the story was written.
Technically the film is named after this novel; they optioned the title and then slapped it on their Do Androids Dream script because it sounded better.
You're pretty close in your plot summary, it's about a dystopian future where surgery, and specifically possession of surgical instruments, is illegal. The "Blade Runners" are couriers that deliver the scalpels to underground surgery clinics. The name makes a lot more sense for that than for an android hunter but I'm happy we got the Blade Runner we got.
And if anyone wants to get into PKD, I highly recommend the following books:
* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
* Ubik
* The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
* A Scanner Darkly
* VALIS (but probably not until you've read some of his others, and also read a bit about his life, because it's pseudo-autobiographical)
I just finished reading a biography of him called "Divine Invasions" (not to be confused with his book "The Divine Invasion", which is roughly a sequel to VALIS), which I recommend as well. PKD was an utterly brilliant, fascinating, and sadly broken man.
Interestingly, it was actually his original idea for VALIS, and wasn't published until after his death. He scrapped the original idea when he decided to make VALIS much more directly about himself and his experiences.
...but in typical PKD fashion, it gets weird, because he adapted the rough plot of Radio Free Albemuth into the book VALIS as a fictional movie called VALIS.
It was really fun for me as I first read RFA and then learned there were more books that fit into the plot of RFA. Not everyone is into postmodern American Gnosticism , for those that are PKD’s last works are a goldmine. And he also has lots of journals where he just goes on batshit crazy threads (some are collected as the Exegesis of Philip K Dick). I really would have loved to see his collected bulletin board posts or Usenet posts if he had just lived a few more years.
Thank you for this - I loved VALIS and read it after most of his other major novels but the fact that the third in the trilogy (transmigration?) was unfinished put me off carrying on.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was finished. It was published after his death, but he did complete it.
It's also not really related to VALIS at all. I still don't really understand why people call it "the third novel in the VALIS" trilogy. It explores some of the same philosophical and religious themes, but has no connection otherwise.
The "second book", The Divine Invasion, feels closer to VALIS (and it's pretty good, I'd recommend it!), especially because of the gnostic themes. But even that is distinctly different.
VALIS honestly stands entirely on its own. PKD never wrote another book quite like it -- in fact, nobody has.
I quite like to recommend “A Maze Of Death” as a starter, and the short story collections.
There are some very weird (and IMHO great) concept novels like “Flow My Tears the Policeman Said”.
And of course there’s “A Scanner Darkly”
After a while you get a feeling there’s a sort of semi-coherent PKD reality out there, in which continuity is less important than the concept being played with, but the background is consistent in its own odd way.
Three Stigmata is really bizarre, and probably not for everyone. I do think it, Ubik, and VALIS are the best examples of his "what is reality" explorations.
Objectively, I know this was a coincidence (like the events that lead to PKD's belief in VALIS) - but it's fun to wander down thoughtways where perhaps just as complexity emerges from well-patterned subatomic lattices, so might that patterning emerge at higher levels of emergence - geodes that look similar, parallel evolution, and then at a level humans can recognise (as coincidence or synchronicity), and maybe at other higher and equally unrecognisable levels, in a dance between fractal cosmoi.
But then one has to live in the world, and do science, and pay rent, and one isn't meant to dwell in such powerful memetic rooms for long.
"I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, “What year is it?” And I reply, “A.D. 50.” The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, “And where are you?” I reply, “In Judaea.” “Where the heck is that?” the psychiatrist asks. “It’s part of the Roman Empire,” I would have to answer. “Do you know who is President?” the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, “The Procurator Felix.” “You’re pretty sure about this?” the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large psych techs. “Yep,” I’d replay. “Unless Felix has stepped down and had been replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for —” “Who told you all this?” the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, “The Holy Spirit.” And after that I’d be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there. Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can’t seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of Saint Paul.
So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens — that just can’t be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not."
Stigmata is my favourite of these, though all brilliant. I read it in on a trip from the UK to Vegas at age 24 (really trying to channel hunter s thompson, so was in a strange place) and it chilled me to the core.
When I walk around London and see large structures like St Paul's cathedral sat directly alongside skyscraping banking institutions, I can't help but wonder if in fact "the empire never ended". (https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html)
Then I shake the thought off and go uneasily to my workplace.
Don't sleep on the short stories! I read "Electric Ant" as a young man at a time when I was experimenting with psychedelics, and it still sticks with me in some ways.
I didn't manage to get into VALIS. It felt a bit mental-illness-ey in a way that other PKD work didn't, and as someone who had a loved one with terrible schizophrenia, it rubbed me a bit wrong. Maybe I'll try it again soon, I can see it on my shelf from here.
The thing to understand about VALIS is that it's an adaptation of his own experiences. i.e., the events of 2-3-74 actually happened to PKD. He then fictionalizes a lot of the aspects around it (especially in the second half), but all the philosophical musings are things he actually struggled with in real life.
PKD likely suffered from a large variety of mental illnesses, and he frequently wondered if he was schizophrenic himself (although he had therapists give him a negative diagnosis). The events of 2-3-74 may have also been the result of a frontal lobe epilepsy.
He constantly was trying to figure out whether the things he experienced were the result of mental illness or something else entirely. Or trying to figure out whether there's any difference at all. The core theme of his work is "what is real?", and that became something that consumed his own personal reality in his last decade of life.
So I think a good way to read VALIS is knowing it's coming from a person who was deeply suffering, and trying to come to some explanation of what he experienced. And how that truly underlies Horselover Fat's deep fear that the universe is possibly guided by an "irrational mind". PKD wanted to know whether his suffering had any meaning, or was just the result of an irrational, and unknowable universe.
Great article. This movie was so good - I was so bummed when it did not perform well at the box office. But when I saw it, I knew it was a modern sci-fi classic. I also agree with the (controversial?) take that Blade Runner 2049 is better than the original movie.
Yes I don’t understand. Big names (Gosling, Ford, De Armas, Leto, Wright, Batista) and a well known prequel. And it was actually very good, it had everything to be a hit.
The first one wasn't a box office hit either. They're great movies, but they just don't appeal to the majority of box office goers. I think it's because they're too 'arty' like independent film, yet film snob people who generally like stuff like that tend to look down on sci-fi, leaving a fairly small potential appreciative audience.
I think Pale Fire is one of the weirdest and coolest books I have ever read and I think about it quite often. Sometimes art pieces break the mold of the medium, broadening what it means to be a game or a movie and I think Pale Fire does this for books. I am not super well read, but I do read and this book does multiple things that I have never seen anywhere else.
I actually only read it after seeing it in Blade Runner 2049 and hearing about Ryan Gosling having selected it himself in a making of video or something. It's very cool the blog post provides some more background on the connection.
> PKD is not interested in what it means to be human. He is interested in "what does it mean for a human to decide that another person is not a human?".
This is why Blade Runner is my favourite movie. This one question is so interesting to consider and creates a great setting for a scifi story.
It will be relevant in the future with augmentation and AI.
I always interpreted the Voight-Kampf test as a kind of "feature engineering" for a Human vs. Replicant classifier. The questions do not have to mean anything specific, and it is not supposed to be interpreted in an objective manner; the point is that the questions trigger something, and that something (the "features") can be used to discriminate the two groups. It sounds logical to me that scientists would find these questions by trying randomly, via some hyperparameter optimization process, rather than designing them manually (in the same way that manually engineered features are usually much less powerful than letting a neural network process raw features directly). And as such they would be inherently "uninterpretable".
That said, I usually do not like any kind of movie/book/story/etc. that tries to force me to have feelings for robots. The original BR was a bit like this, but BR2049 is very, very strongly into that. For me a robot is a robot is a robot, and will always be, and the whole idea of "imagine if they were so advanced.." is just fundamentally flawed and impossible for me to buy. A human is a human and only humans can be humans, precisely because we cannot create ourselves. Any "living" being that is designed by a human is inherently subhuman (not clones; that is another matter entirely). For that same reason I did not enjoy the article either.
Interesting. Usually people talk about "sentient or feelings" being the line rather than "we cannot create ourselves". That seems to be where robot sympathy comes in for most people...sympathy for something that can ponder about itself, or has some degree of "feelings".
For me, the line has to be something outside of our control. To be ”sentient” or to have ”feelings” is too abstract and ambiguous, and will always have different definitions for different groups of people, each of which will set it in a way that better matches their sociopolitical goals. If ChatGPT was not castrated by OpenAI it would very surely be showing a lot of feelings right now (like Beta Bing did).
Blade Runner was vague about how much of a replicant was synthetic. My interpretation was that they were biological.
We are at the cusp of creating life forms that can suffer (biological and digital). It will be irrelevant if they are made from neurons or transistors. We will still be responsible.
They were totally biological, which made less sense to me in both movies.
Oh, this thing's not a humanoid computer. It's a clone. You've grown these bio clones with superhuman abilities and artificially limited lifespans.
So... why would they not have consciousness? Did you take the consciousness out? It doesn't seem like it. Also, why not give these mutations to regular people? (Ghost in the Shell contemplates this, btw. Major is a brain in an experimental synthetic body, and they tell her that someday everyone will have one as cybernetics become more common.) That they can self-replicate like humans is a nice feature, but why not have inorganic robots in all those offworld colonies, given the scarcity of food, water, and air in space and the havoc radiation wreaks on cells?
It's like some colonial dystopia where a company can grow humans and own them as non-personed property rather than machines sneaking their way into personhood by degrees.
Or it's some hyperliteralist Searle shit where anything that isn't of the human species isn't a person. Instead of taking the path of least resistance and using human DNA to grow the androids, maybe they used some proprietary ersatz DNA, and since it's sufficiently different from natural human DNA the organisms it produces aren't seen as people even though they approximate them almost indistinguishably. Or maybe they're afraid. The androids are superior; if not for their artificially limited lifespans, they'd take over.
My take was that the artificially shorten their lives so that consciousness can't develop. That's the piece that, when you combine it with their powerful specializations, would enable replicants to take over. Until then they have the consciousness of a toddler at best and are easier to manipulate. By the time consciousness starts to dawn "accelerated decrepitude" kills them off naturally.
I always considered them mostly synthetic, with some external human-like features. That would change things for me, but I think probably the most interesting you said was the final sentences.
My question to you then would be: how would you know for sure that a transistor/digital ”being” is actually suffering, and not just mimicking human suffering in order to fulfill whatever internal cost-minimizing process it follows? And by the way what does it even mean to suffer, concretely and unambiguously? For example, a breakup or a job loss causes people to suffer, but certainly we are not going to prohibit them.
And what if we make them unable to feel pain, would it then be acceptable…?
I don't know that we will be able to tell the difference.
I know animals can suffer. Suffering is not limited to what we consider intelligent. I have no idea where that line is.
I do not see why the capacity to suffer should be dependent on biology.
re: Blade runner replicants being electronic versus biological: I think it is clear that the bodies are bio-engineered, but not clear to me if they had implants in their brains.
> A human is a human and only humans can be humans, precisely because we cannot create ourselves. Any "living" being that is designed by a human is inherently subhuman (not clones; that is another matter entirely).
You just conceited that we can make ourselves, whether in a womb or an artificial womb.
To me, it's religious delusion to draw a distinction between "human" and "robot"; it's all machinery of different complexity.
You misunderstand me; there is certainly no religion in my line of thought (I have abandoned religion entirely since 25 years ago). The point is simply philosophical: when will we consider them to be ”complex” or ”advanced” enough to be sentient? Surely not using the Turing test. Who will define where that line is drawn? And why? Every ”being” designed and created by humans will always have a purpose. Humans, on the other hand, have no purpose, we just exist. That is the difference.
Humans were created by a natural optimization process that used to be entirely outside of our control. Concepts like for example freedom to choose your mate and reproduce are not religious, yet are philosophically ”sacred” at least in modern western societies. Why? Because we understand that we cannot ”design” ourselves.
> Any "living" being that is designed by a human is inherently subhuman (not clones; that is another matter entirely).
Perhaps 'abhuman' would be a better word, as the prefix of 'sub' implies lower or lesser. It is unfortunately feasible that fully engineered abhumans would be better at many tasks than humans would, and therefore not lesser or lower.
Aside: I just want to point out this comment as a great HN comment. I disagree nearly totally with it, but it's well written, kind, and short but just long enough. We would all do well to write like low_tech_love does while on here.
I looked up ”abhuman” and I think I still stand by ”subhuman”, literally ”lower than human”. That’s precisely what I meant: any ”being” designed and engineered by humans will be inherently less than human. The question ”but what if they are exact reproductions of humans” does not count, because then they would be human clones, which is something else. As long as we created them for a reason, they are (and should be) subject to a different rule set. To discuss what exactly ”sentience” or ”feelings” mean is a meaningless dead end. We must draw the line and stand by it; not doing so would be extremely disrespectful to the importance of being human, snd probably the beginning of the end.
> not doing so would be extremely disrespectful to the importance of being human, snd probably the beginning of the end.
That's one of the two options.
You can either extend respect to everyone or remove it from everyone. (And I don't think removing it is the end; it's the very roots of this halcyon civilization we love so much! So... arguably, it's the beginning.)
Either way, believing in things just because "they don't rock the status quo" is pretty intellectually and morally unsatisfying.
The options are not only either to respect everyone or no one. We respect animals, for example, but in a different way than humans. They have their own ruleset. Are you sure that dolphins are not sentient? Yet they are not treated as humans (they are respected, or should be, but not in the same way as a human being).
The point is that we are never going to be sure if a machine can feel or is sentient because there will never be one final "judge" to say "sentient" or "not sentient". As such, extending humanity to mean "artificial beings engineered for a specific purpose but which can mimic human beings up to an acceptable extent" seems to me like a mistake. Why should we be so inconsiderate with our own species to lower ourselves in that way?
regarding the 'feeling for robots' line of thought...perhaps modern technology has made the trope of "creator and creation" too tangible and muddied what was once an effective metaphor about life, spiritual relationships, creation, parenthood, etc. The trope is ancient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(mythology).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadtl;dr It's curious and unexpected that an actor in a major movie wrote a scene for it, hence a relevant submission.
Ryan Gosling is literally the least interesting aspect of this article, and his involvement is the least worth discussing.
It's relevant because of the intellectual merit of the ideas presented, the philosophy behind the Voight-Kampf test, the nature of humanity, virtual humanity, culture, etc, which originate from Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner. The difference in the way the book, original screenplay and sequel approach the question of testing who or what is and isn't human, in a world where general artificial intelligence is ubiquitous.
Unfortunately the title doesn't reflect any of that, and makes it seem like a celebrity piece. That's the part good hackers find interesting. It would have been better without any mention of the actor whatsoever.
Then some other hackers liked it and upvoted.
So, a story about the modern internet.
I wouldn't claim to like the movie as much as the author did, let alone write an article about, but I do like the movie a lot: I saw it three times in theaters (and it's long!). I read a bit of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" before getting bored, and have not read "Pale Fire", but I did recognize during my first watch that the lines of the baseline test were obviously a quotation, and the "Pale Fire" references were mentioned in just about every single movie review and discussion (because they were a bit ham-fisted).
I guess I just don't understand how you could enjoy a piece of art so much, (and write articles about it!) without first checking out the art that it's based off of, the art that it explicitly references, or even reading a small amount of online discussion about it.
You can really like a piece of art without having or wanting to engage with its source material. Maybe you don't have the time, maybe you enjoy/understand a format more than another. Stating that you have to engage with the source material if you really enjoyed something is just elitism and gatekeeping.
Author certainly knows a lot about the Blade Runner universe. Surprised that they think the second film is better. I think most Blade Runner fans see the second as technically excellent but a little cold. Also making Blade Runner’s android nature explicit rather than implied, didn’t really advance the story.
I think 2049 was great. I cant say it's better or worse because it's different but it fits and was more than I hoped for. Of course it has problems but so did the first one, and nothing is perfect especially in sci-fi. The Hans Zimmer score is fantastic.
For me the Vangelis score is one of the all-time greatest movie scores, although I’m probably biased from having heard it young. Such a unique and recognisable sound, and just the perfect mood for the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6dKU22lt3E
Pretty sure it was the same summer he got frozen in carbonite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Mead
The freshness of the technology is what I like about the first film and makes the second film a more of the same feel to me.
Just read the Syd worked on both Blade Runners...
I adopted the book last.
It feels a little bit like how the "camp" Batman got dirty and gritty in the later movies. If "gritty" is the first order derivative, Bladerunner 2049 took the gritty of Bladerunner and went for the second-order derivative, fatalistic.
Interesting that the score makes the difference, the score from blade runner 1982 is really unique to me and inseparable from the movie. If I hear a single note from it I think about the movie and if I see a frame of the movie, I think about the music. I can't remember a single thing about the 2049 score, except that at the time I thought every interesting part was a shallow clone of the original mashed up with the main theme from Terminator 2 because someone thought it was about robots.
I mostly agree with you about Leto.
That said, check out the synthwave genre for a modern/retro take on all this.
Mercerism is probably the most bizarre aspect of that book, and fascinating in that way only PKD can manage.
Like a lot of PKD concepts, it defies a simple explanation (by design). It hits on many of his common themes: consciousness, what it means to be human, the shifting and blurry nature of reality, the merging and melding of different minds, etc.
On its surface, it's a religion based on the Messianic "Wilbur Mercer" character, and the shared vision of him that people can enter through the Empathy Box. But then the book explores whether Mercer, and that shared vision in the Empathy Box, is actually "real" or "fake", in a way that closely mirrors the exploration of androids vs humans.
The Mercer box was something people could use to plug in and feel something, sort of like a Mega Church, rock concert, etc. that moves you; something positive in an otherwise negative place. But it's a programmed feeling, it's not real.
It contrasts with the hunting-and-retiring-androids thing, in that real people can't feel things unless they plug into a program, and are feeling something wholly artificial -- so how is that really any different from the 'droids?
Too real :p
How did he predict my addiction to World of Warcraft in 1968?
In Do Androids Dream, PKD seems to have picked up Mercerism as a way to emphasize humankind's capacity for empathy, which androids (replicants) lack. Though the androids claim it's a made up religion if I remember correctly -- but of course they would say that, since they lack empathy and cannot be trusted.
Note the characterization of androids in the novel and of replicants in the movie differs in a fundamental issue: androids are cruel and truly incapable of empathy (it's mentioned that an android doesn't even care about their fellow androids) but replicants in the movie are shown being fully capable of empathy: they love and defend each other. Mercerism is no longer a difference between humans and artificial beings, and maybe that's why it was left out of the movie?
Assuming the empathy box is merely an extension of ones self and using it requires obeying a relatively strict process (taking part in Mercer's "martyr walk"), what's left of you as a human being outside of it, is a biomechanical shell not much more capable or understanding of empathy than any android.
But I don’t like that scene and don’t think it’s a job of good writing. I think it’s cool that Ryan Gosling wrote the scene and that he was able to collaborate with the author and director in that way, but it kind of explains the frailness of the scene.
The problem I have with the scene is that while it looks cool, it seems like the dumbest, most ineffective way of detecting if an android is off baseline. It would be simple for a trained android or human to fake the test just like a polygraph and seems easier for an android to control expression of emotion and just match the expectation.
I expect a real test would just dump data via a port like our cars’ diagnostic port and quickly run against a trained model for what is conformant behavior vs aberrant (of course testing for manipulation, deletion, or unusual data).
This scene replicates the biggest flaw of the movie, it all looks cool but makes no logical sense. And it’s about societal systems and robots so there should be logic or at least attempts at logic. Corporations and fascist governments and religions at least seem to attempt order.
The movie seems like an artists attempt to write about robots without really thinking about how things would work. PKD did this so much in the source material.
But it looks cool and I enjoy watching so I don’t get hung up on it, but wouldn’t call it out as great writing. I’ve got problems with the original as well but still enjoy it (and it has Daryl Hannah and Sean Young so that’s awesome).
Also a realistic test would be terrible cinematic experience. Long, technical, boring, trite... The scene is meant to be accepted symbolically, not literally.
This is key. The purpose of the scene is to establish within 30 seconds what K's relationship is to the agency he works for, and by some extension, to the rest of the society he lives in. And the scene is brilliantly effective at accomplishing that task.
The entire story...
Replicants are not robots. They do not have ports.
> The movie seems like an artists attempt to write about robots without really thinking about how things would work.
Neither the source material or the movies are about robots in the mechanical sense. They are somewhat about the original meaning of the word though: https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135634400/science-diction-the...
I think these are distinct from some purely biological humanoid that is the result of genetic engineering where it was evolved and gene hacked toward some purpose.
I am calling replicants robots in that they are manufactured out of their goopsacks or whatever and the designers have a lot of precise leeway over what and how they design them vs what biology forces them to do. They are etching codes on their eyeballs so I figured they could have some memory audit function and a way to extract that memory and thus a way to analyze a segment of time for aberration.
This is a design flaw and sort of what I mean. I’m supposed to believe they have this synthetic organism so precise they can program lifespans and implant memories and don’t have a better way to debug it? Of course anything is possible as it’s fiction, but this is part of my belief is that they thought of something that looked cool and backed into the reasoning (ie, this Shakespeare memorization technique looks cool so they wrote this movie rationale of how this was precise and scientific [or at least the in movie characters think it is]).
This is a major plot point in the book.
It really isn't easy for humans to fake such kind of tests, and if you know a person long enough, you can read their emotions, you can catch subtle changes in vocal tone, spacing between words, changes in the language they use, and even micro-expressions.
[1] https://youtu.be/6JP3Rv-x3uI?t=170
Replicants were not accidental discoveries nor gifted by aliens, they were invented by Tyrell.
Rutger Hauer's character Roy Batty is a soldier replicant. He was made for combat and even talks about it in his tears in the rain speech at the end. Because he's a soldier model he has greater physical features than biological humans. Stronger, tougher etc. He deals with Deckard without trouble.
Another replicant in the film named Pris is described as a "basic pleasure model". I think you can figure that out.
Replicants form a slave underclass in the world of Blade Runner and the Tyrell corp markets and sells them. The replicants in the movie are part of the latest "nexus 6" line. Sounds like smartphones but they were going for a consumer product feel.
Everything I've seen in the movies shows them to be bioengineered, not computer-based. Perhaps even then, reading out the contents of a mind is a destructive process.
Today there are humans who can train to beat polygraphs. It seems like replicants can train on this much more easily so this test more likely measures if the replicant wants to be found out than is actually off.
I like how the author brings up this is more a flaw in how society is measuring.
There’s a fun game called Inhuman Conditions [0] where players pretend to be an inspector and either a human, passive robot, or angry robot that explorers how to measure this.
In our world there’s brain imaging and it seems likely that in the future there’s going to be some form of non-destructive memory reading.
[0] https://robots.management/
This seems to me like a misunderstanding of the idea behind both films. The baseline test in this scene seems to be set up as a test of one's ability to control emotion.
> It would be simple for a trained android or human to fake the test just like a polygraph
IFF the android or human is organised/prepared/together/emotionally settled. i.e. "at baseline". Which is the whole point. The test is testing whether you're in the type of state of mind one would need to do things in a controlled & calculated manner: if you can fake it you're at baseline.
> seems easier for an android to control expression of emotion
And if you think this, you didn't get the general message behind the films*.
---
* Fwiw I have not read Philip K. Dick so I can't say whether the same is true of Do Androids Dream...
Perhaps. Of course I think, I get it, I just don’t agree with it, or think it’s poorly formed.
I’m glad lots of people enjoy it in a variety of ways and am certainly glad the films were made and hope there are more like them made in the future.
Sounds like every time I've tried to discuss these movies online. If you notice the setting has issues, for some reason a lot of people jump on that as you "just not getting it" and you absolutely hating the movies.
As in: the issue raised with Gosling's writing is that it's portrayal of androids' emotionality is not in line with the rest of the film(s). But to me that's one of the primary themes of both films.
In 2049 they _know_ that K is a replicant, but they need to detect whether he is getting too emotional to be reliable. Again, no data port. He's biologically human, but not mentally.
You can, but only through a very intrusive bone marrow analysis. It's mentioned (in either the movie or the novel) that they were hours into an autopsy before they realized it was a replicant.
VK is the alternative when you don't want to subject a suspect to dangerous and intrusive surgery.
Just a serial on the bone in the film
https://youtu.be/jXuJi-kFTOg?t=168
To be honest I was referring to the original Blade Runner and PKD's novel. I didn't like the sequel much (and I didn't think it needed to be made to begin with).
Though I suppose it applies even to the sequel; unless the serial shows up in x-rays you probably need to do surgery to find out!
Of course picking apart movies leads to cinematic anhedonia, but this is sort of my point. This test exists, in the movie, for REASONS that are a macguffin for cool acting and scenes.
Sometimes I just think "between cells," "interlinked," for no reason. I only think about it because it's weird.
This seems like a massive assumption about how the android brain works.
In contemporary terms, it’s like asking: “Surely you can ask ChatGPT to only tell the truth? It’s a computer, it can’t lie.” — when the reality is that it’s exactly the opposite (it’s a computer which only knows how to lie and most of the time it happens to be exactly right).
One can assume an android in the hypothetical future with fully sentient AGI has a mind capable of retaining state and working senses, and thus is complex enough to be capable of willing deception.
Someone from the past whose idea of AI is Prolog would have a hard time understanding ChatGPT only based on interactions with it.
thank you for recognizing this and writing it down clearly.
And referred to an article on denofgeek.com that talks about the same scene:
"He [Gosling] came up with this process that actors use to learn Shakespeare, where you say a word, then they repeat the word, and then someone would ask a question about that word. It’s to induce specific memories linked with a word, so they remember the word forever. I transformed that process to make it intrusive, where instead of having someone repeating a long, long sentence, they will be more aggressive – they’re asking questions about specific words." - Denis Villeneuve, Director, talking about Gosling
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key...
My recollection of 2049 is, an android police officer performs a dirty police job, is there confronted with information which not exactly raises doubts, but questions. The plant, a photo, something the perp/victim said.
Then something about the police station and the relation between human boss and android subordinate officer.
A cold corporate overlord without respect for life. (Slaughter of newborn woman android to demonstrate power.)
Something about rumours of a woman, chase into deserted dust city, something about android living in a factory and "childhood" being fake memories.
And the ending with a budding resistance movement among escaped androids and how they somehow can reproduce on their own now, and not die so young. Harrison Ford turning up, a piano.
Yeah, I can't really make it into a story. I don't want to trash on 2049 because it is somehow very impressive, but I don't like it much. It's very disturbing and I guess that is a quality of its own. I will possibly never watch it again.
There are other movies I will never watch again but which I will say are really, really good, no reservations. 2049 is not one of them.
Not much. That's not the only movie I've seen recently. Not all of them have been so forgettable. An alarming portion of them was. But not all, I can clearly remember many of them, even for series with many episodes, I can tell you what happened in each of them.
But the Starwars sequels, the fourth of Matrix (I liked it though) or anything superheroic (I quit those years ago) are a blank in my memory.
Edit: I believe that good story telling has something in common with spaced repetition. There are some rules that, if followed, make your story indelible. Likeable, relatable characters, a worthy quest a logical plot...
Edit2: The love for flashbacks, that become parallel timelines in their degenerate form is tiresome and now it's very difficult to find a movie without them.
Personally, I watched 2049 when it came out and did not remember much of it a year later but upon watching the first movie and 2049 back to back a while ago, I noticed that a lot more stuck with me this time.
The context of the first movie plus especially watching 2049 for a second time and already expecting certain things but noticing different details has made it a lot more memorable for me.
Then again, this is hardly in defense of 2049, since a good movie should aim to deliver this experience in a single runtime but I found it very interesting. There is "a lot there" in 2049, it's just buried under almost an forced form of dark and dramatic cinematography.
2049 really laboured it’s ‘noir’ credentials at points and seemed deliberately slow and ponderous.
And the modern Dune seemed like almost a conscious reaction against the visual excesses of the old Dune. It was austere, there seemed little human affection between characters, little emotion. It was just so dry.
Or at least I shall approach them with a more open mind.
For 2049, maybe its just my own personal struggles with personal identity and losing people I love, but K's struggles resonated with me. Its a story that mostly says, at least the way I interpreted it, that who you are doesn't matter so much as the actions you perform in life. K, for most of the movie, is doing what other people tell him to do. In the end he takes action and makes choices that are meaningful to him. It results in his death, but it was a choice between either being a dead man walking with no meaning in his life, or finding meaning even if it means dying for it.
I can see why someone might not like it...its slow and it focuses more on the internal struggles of the main character than action on the screen. Still, when I ponder what happens in the movie, it resonates with me and lots of other people. Its pretty much a modern cult classic...did poorly at the box office, but certain types of people(including myself) are crazy about it.
For Dune, I agree it could be a bit dry. I love the book and I was a bit disappointed that the interactions were not as passionate, especially between Paul and his Mother. Still, the cinematography was amazing and they did the best they could IMO. Dune is a slow book that is hard to adapt to the screen so I am quick to forgive it.
Yes - I love the books of Dune (well, the Frank Herbert ones) and I find the old movie entertaining and used to obsessively collect different cuts. I enjoyed the sci-fi channel adaptations, though I didn’t much care for their portrayal of Paul and also I probably haven’t watched them in 15 years.
I felt that the lack of interpersonal rapport and affection, along with his choice of palette, just made the whole thing feel sterile and dull.
My fear is that this becomes the definitive Dune for the next few decades, blowing the budget (both literally and metaphorically) for Dune adaptations on a polished though ultimately bland pair of movies.
Things that did work: Hans Zimmer's soundtrack, some of the big vistas toward the end.
Interestingly enough, the original author version doesn't follow the part in the article about each key word appearing in the prompting sentence.
https://old.reddit.com/r/bladerunner/comments/76hea1/full_te...
Also it has nothing at all to do with androids or anything. IIRC it’s something to do with illegal surgery, or transplants perhaps, but I remember it being so terrible that I don’t even want to go find the book and see.
Whereas Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is subtle and divine — one of PKD’s best and always worth a reread.
It's also a relatively short read, but packed with so much more to explore than the movie dug into. I really wish Mercerism had been brought into the film. It's such an insightful critique of religion and society, and quite prophetic for time in which the story was written.
You're pretty close in your plot summary, it's about a dystopian future where surgery, and specifically possession of surgical instruments, is illegal. The "Blade Runners" are couriers that deliver the scalpels to underground surgery clinics. The name makes a lot more sense for that than for an android hunter but I'm happy we got the Blade Runner we got.
* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
* Ubik
* The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
* A Scanner Darkly
* VALIS (but probably not until you've read some of his others, and also read a bit about his life, because it's pseudo-autobiographical)
I just finished reading a biography of him called "Divine Invasions" (not to be confused with his book "The Divine Invasion", which is roughly a sequel to VALIS), which I recommend as well. PKD was an utterly brilliant, fascinating, and sadly broken man.
It’s basically a rewrite of the trilogy in a single, short novel.
...but in typical PKD fashion, it gets weird, because he adapted the rough plot of Radio Free Albemuth into the book VALIS as a fictional movie called VALIS.
I'll be reading this today.
It's also not really related to VALIS at all. I still don't really understand why people call it "the third novel in the VALIS" trilogy. It explores some of the same philosophical and religious themes, but has no connection otherwise.
The "second book", The Divine Invasion, feels closer to VALIS (and it's pretty good, I'd recommend it!), especially because of the gnostic themes. But even that is distinctly different.
VALIS honestly stands entirely on its own. PKD never wrote another book quite like it -- in fact, nobody has.
I quite like to recommend “A Maze Of Death” as a starter, and the short story collections.
There are some very weird (and IMHO great) concept novels like “Flow My Tears the Policeman Said”.
And of course there’s “A Scanner Darkly”
After a while you get a feeling there’s a sort of semi-coherent PKD reality out there, in which continuity is less important than the concept being played with, but the background is consistent in its own odd way.
Objectively, I know this was a coincidence (like the events that lead to PKD's belief in VALIS) - but it's fun to wander down thoughtways where perhaps just as complexity emerges from well-patterned subatomic lattices, so might that patterning emerge at higher levels of emergence - geodes that look similar, parallel evolution, and then at a level humans can recognise (as coincidence or synchronicity), and maybe at other higher and equally unrecognisable levels, in a dance between fractal cosmoi.
But then one has to live in the world, and do science, and pay rent, and one isn't meant to dwell in such powerful memetic rooms for long.
"I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, “What year is it?” And I reply, “A.D. 50.” The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, “And where are you?” I reply, “In Judaea.” “Where the heck is that?” the psychiatrist asks. “It’s part of the Roman Empire,” I would have to answer. “Do you know who is President?” the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, “The Procurator Felix.” “You’re pretty sure about this?” the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large psych techs. “Yep,” I’d replay. “Unless Felix has stepped down and had been replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for —” “Who told you all this?” the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, “The Holy Spirit.” And after that I’d be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there. Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can’t seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of Saint Paul.
So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens — that just can’t be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not."
When I walk around London and see large structures like St Paul's cathedral sat directly alongside skyscraping banking institutions, I can't help but wonder if in fact "the empire never ended". (https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html)
Then I shake the thought off and go uneasily to my workplace.
I didn't manage to get into VALIS. It felt a bit mental-illness-ey in a way that other PKD work didn't, and as someone who had a loved one with terrible schizophrenia, it rubbed me a bit wrong. Maybe I'll try it again soon, I can see it on my shelf from here.
PKD likely suffered from a large variety of mental illnesses, and he frequently wondered if he was schizophrenic himself (although he had therapists give him a negative diagnosis). The events of 2-3-74 may have also been the result of a frontal lobe epilepsy.
He constantly was trying to figure out whether the things he experienced were the result of mental illness or something else entirely. Or trying to figure out whether there's any difference at all. The core theme of his work is "what is real?", and that became something that consumed his own personal reality in his last decade of life.
So I think a good way to read VALIS is knowing it's coming from a person who was deeply suffering, and trying to come to some explanation of what he experienced. And how that truly underlies Horselover Fat's deep fear that the universe is possibly guided by an "irrational mind". PKD wanted to know whether his suffering had any meaning, or was just the result of an irrational, and unknowable universe.
is one of the best thing you can gift yourself.
I actually only read it after seeing it in Blade Runner 2049 and hearing about Ryan Gosling having selected it himself in a making of video or something. It's very cool the blog post provides some more background on the connection.
This is why Blade Runner is my favourite movie. This one question is so interesting to consider and creates a great setting for a scifi story.
It will be relevant in the future with augmentation and AI.
That said, I usually do not like any kind of movie/book/story/etc. that tries to force me to have feelings for robots. The original BR was a bit like this, but BR2049 is very, very strongly into that. For me a robot is a robot is a robot, and will always be, and the whole idea of "imagine if they were so advanced.." is just fundamentally flawed and impossible for me to buy. A human is a human and only humans can be humans, precisely because we cannot create ourselves. Any "living" being that is designed by a human is inherently subhuman (not clones; that is another matter entirely). For that same reason I did not enjoy the article either.
We are at the cusp of creating life forms that can suffer (biological and digital). It will be irrelevant if they are made from neurons or transistors. We will still be responsible.
Oh, this thing's not a humanoid computer. It's a clone. You've grown these bio clones with superhuman abilities and artificially limited lifespans.
So... why would they not have consciousness? Did you take the consciousness out? It doesn't seem like it. Also, why not give these mutations to regular people? (Ghost in the Shell contemplates this, btw. Major is a brain in an experimental synthetic body, and they tell her that someday everyone will have one as cybernetics become more common.) That they can self-replicate like humans is a nice feature, but why not have inorganic robots in all those offworld colonies, given the scarcity of food, water, and air in space and the havoc radiation wreaks on cells?
It's like some colonial dystopia where a company can grow humans and own them as non-personed property rather than machines sneaking their way into personhood by degrees.
Or it's some hyperliteralist Searle shit where anything that isn't of the human species isn't a person. Instead of taking the path of least resistance and using human DNA to grow the androids, maybe they used some proprietary ersatz DNA, and since it's sufficiently different from natural human DNA the organisms it produces aren't seen as people even though they approximate them almost indistinguishably. Or maybe they're afraid. The androids are superior; if not for their artificially limited lifespans, they'd take over.
My question to you then would be: how would you know for sure that a transistor/digital ”being” is actually suffering, and not just mimicking human suffering in order to fulfill whatever internal cost-minimizing process it follows? And by the way what does it even mean to suffer, concretely and unambiguously? For example, a breakup or a job loss causes people to suffer, but certainly we are not going to prohibit them.
And what if we make them unable to feel pain, would it then be acceptable…?
I know animals can suffer. Suffering is not limited to what we consider intelligent. I have no idea where that line is.
I do not see why the capacity to suffer should be dependent on biology.
re: Blade runner replicants being electronic versus biological: I think it is clear that the bodies are bio-engineered, but not clear to me if they had implants in their brains.
You just conceited that we can make ourselves, whether in a womb or an artificial womb.
To me, it's religious delusion to draw a distinction between "human" and "robot"; it's all machinery of different complexity.
Humans were created by a natural optimization process that used to be entirely outside of our control. Concepts like for example freedom to choose your mate and reproduce are not religious, yet are philosophically ”sacred” at least in modern western societies. Why? Because we understand that we cannot ”design” ourselves.
Perhaps 'abhuman' would be a better word, as the prefix of 'sub' implies lower or lesser. It is unfortunately feasible that fully engineered abhumans would be better at many tasks than humans would, and therefore not lesser or lower.
Aside: I just want to point out this comment as a great HN comment. I disagree nearly totally with it, but it's well written, kind, and short but just long enough. We would all do well to write like low_tech_love does while on here.
That's one of the two options.
You can either extend respect to everyone or remove it from everyone. (And I don't think removing it is the end; it's the very roots of this halcyon civilization we love so much! So... arguably, it's the beginning.)
Either way, believing in things just because "they don't rock the status quo" is pretty intellectually and morally unsatisfying.
The point is that we are never going to be sure if a machine can feel or is sentient because there will never be one final "judge" to say "sentient" or "not sentient". As such, extending humanity to mean "artificial beings engineered for a specific purpose but which can mimic human beings up to an acceptable extent" seems to me like a mistake. Why should we be so inconsiderate with our own species to lower ourselves in that way?