Blade Runner is a classic of the sci-fi genre, and also an insight and a warning into our present state of politics. The central plot tension lies in the question “how might humans distinguish a sophisticated robot from a human being?”
Watching Chris Luxon (leader of the National political party in New Zealand) blather recently, I was struck by a thought – what if he were a human instantiation of ChatGPT, rather than an actual person? How would we know?
If AI were to chose a bodily vehicle, wouldn’t that be a sensible choice? Bland, bald, nominally successful, middle-aged, middle-class. Trustworthy. Not too bling.
Or in reverse: if Harrison Ford were interrogating Chris to assess his humanity, would he distinguish himself from a Replicant like Rachel in his responses?
Is the truth perhaps that humans and robots have been metaphorically interbreeding for some time, and those politicians presently rising to the top are actually the most successful hybrids?
Politicians have always needed a certain moral “flexibility” in terms of changing position to reflect back to their audience what it wants to hear.
Traditionally that was done by “reading the room” using human emotional intelligence traits such as empathy to gauge and reflect back shared concerns and emotions. That’s human, and at it’s best it results in genuine leadership and social cohesion.
Then entered the twin robots of polling and media. Both fields have existed forever, of course, but their power has grown exponentially in recent years and they’ve become less human and more automated.
Social media has created the mechanisms both for near-instantaneous polling of sentiment, and for iterative testing of political messaging. The Cambridge Analytica tales hinted at this power, but meaningful discussion of it all but ended when that story fell from the headlines.
Both social and traditional media have provided a pervasive layer of filtered messaging between the politician and the public that distils the human being into a curated media package with little more depth than a pixelated avatar.
Much of the general public sense this – to the extent their authentic emotional selves still exist – and grow restless. Yet few words are spoken or printed to validate the felt sense that the political world is just so absurdly fake at this point.
Esteemed and credentialed mainstream political journalists and commentators earnestly poke the political entrails and write vacuous columns on the sputterings of politicians as though their words were durable and in some way meaningful. Whilst also understanding that if tomorrow the polls say something different, those talking heads will make different face noises.
It’s as though as individuals and as a society we’ll willingly believe any absurdity at all rather than face squarely up to fact we have absolutely no access to honesty or truth via the channels or politics and media.
A second theme running through Blade Runner is that of memory. Human recollection and an ability to recall and reflect on our past informs our humanity. The absence of memories betrays Replicants, so in their most sophisticated perfected form, memories are falsely implanted.
While scientific competence in genetic manipulation is advancing, there is no realistic prospect of engineering Replicants from the ground up as per the film any time soon. In the interim there’s a far more expeditious method of engineering false memories under way.
How many people around you understand the “Russiagate” scandal of 2016 was a fabrication from start to finish? How many still believe the thoroughly-debunked idea that Trump was in bed with the Russians? The coordinated psychic bombardment by hundreds of such stories in recent years has embedded false “memories” in most of us. Saddam wasn’t involved in 9/11. Assad didn’t gas Syrian civilians. Roosevelt was not blindsided by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. And on, and on.
We love to think of human versus replicant/technology as a binary distinction. But perhaps the truth is closer to a “gender-fluid” view of the world? The components of our individual identities are forged in many places, and some of those places are run by algorithm. When we suckle from the firehose of autonomous nonsense generated by the media machine, how much of what we ingest is filtered? Is categorised? Is sifted and rejected?
The human brain is remarkably plastic – and elastic – and will conform to any manner of nonsense we allow in. By the time we’ve imbibed deeply, the walls of our skulls contain a mix of reality and unreality, part human and part ‘bot. And our ability to distinguish one from the other is much, much lesser than we generally flatter ourselves.
Implanted memories play a critical part in the present Replicant deception, only they’re not injected biologically, but via the media. Our Replicant parts don’t know the difference.
I’d argue that Replicants exist and already form a substantial part of society. They weren’t bio-engineered as Blade Runner foresaw, they were hacked from natural humans via the introjection of false memories en-masse. The process has being underway for decades, but kicked off in earnest in 2014, as Jacob Siegel has documented.
Just as huge parts of our food chain are now dominated by engineered genetic biological clones, our social and cultural spaces are similarly cloned and engineered. What passes for “polite society” is increasingly nothing more than an engineered monoculture of mind.
This article is rather brilliant...I hope everyone has the opportunity to read it. I have not thought about Blade Runner for a while, although have seen it at least three times in the past. Revisiting all of these pertinent movies after our experience these past three years is a good idea...they take on quite a bit of a different meaning.
I have always thought that if the human body was just a very sophisticated machine that one day that sophistication will be matched by human invention and a "robot" will be created that can contain consciousness and soul...the body is just a "space suit" for the soul, isn't it? So why not make our own, more durable, and eternal, suit for our soul to occupy?
I no longer believe this is possible...and for the life of me I can't really tell you why. Even hypothetically I think it is a hypothesis that is flawed. Soul can "occupy" other "containers" but not really...I cannot explain it...
Thanks for this wonderful article!!