The Essay: Blade Runner at 40

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

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The Essay: 2019 - The Year of Blade Runner

The Essay: Blade Runner at 40: Zhora and the Snake - Dr Beth Singler

Zhora and the Snake - Dr Beth Singler

Blade Runner at 40

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Blade Runner at 40, Zhora and the Snake - Dr Beth Singler

Dr Beth Singler explores the ethics of AI sexbots in Zhora and the Snake.

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. Exploring the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic, Dr Beth Singler on the ethics of AI sexbots in Zhora and the Snake.

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic film where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations and extreme divides between rich and poor.

Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways.  Dr Beth Singler, Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at Homerton College, Cambridge asks what is real and fake in A.I. sex and love.

"Simulation forces us to think about how we can the ‘real’ that we seem so often to be confident about. Confident enough perhaps to reassure ourselves that the use of ‘fake’ humans as slave labour and sexbots is alright to be skimmed over in the dialogue of the human characters in Blade Runner.  What does it say about the society in the world of Blade Runner that it is okay with slave replicants who fight our off-world wars and fulfil sexual needs for colonists?
It gets worse. What does it say about a society that is okay with slave replicants who are only two years old?"

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The Essay explores the dystopian world of Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner.

Forty years ago, the future came into focus in Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner. All this week, The Essay explores the dystopian world of the film.

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