Extended Phenotype

It’s that time of year to watch what must be the best movie ever made – Blade Runner. But every time I see this movie I reflect on the fact that we are still some way off the future as imagined in my youth. Blade Runner, made in 1982, is set in Los Angeles in 2019. As with any futuristic film it is impossible to predict the future technologies, but twenty odd years later, let us see where we are at.

So obviously we are not flying around in plane cars, which is a shame. Also we are not all pining to fly off to outer space colonies – with Earth left with the dregs of society. Nor, just yet, has LA degenerated into a  dark rainy environment as envisaged by Ridley Scott (In the film it is not clear if all the action happens at night, or this is a permanent weather state). Annoying ads in the sky has been done, though we have better ways of selling to each other and the prediction that the “Future is old” is in many cases more real than the shiny new world imagined in the 60′s.

The biggest hole as far as the film is concerned vs today is the androids themselves. Even in ’82 it was clear that computers were becoming great at many many tasks and would take over our lives – the Apple Mac was released in the same year. But realism and human-like qualities have proved nigh on impossible to match. The more we know about the human brain and consciousness the more surprising it all seems. On the flip side our computers and their power as well as the graphics we take for granted and their absolute saturation in our culture are equivalent to the skin-jobs of Blade Runner.

We have seven years to perfect space travel, colonise other worlds, perfect human-like robots and ruin the environment. One out of four is quite poor, so let us get cracking.