Motion Pictures

Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, is a very popular movie that is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, which is now a megacity. The movie revolves around Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) finding and retiring replicants—bioengineered robots designed to look, act, and think like humans. In this movie, there are two different aspects of AI that we can examine.

In Blade Runner’s universe, the replicants exist to complete dangerous or menial work on Earth’s colonies, such as the Moon. Their presence on Earth is, however, prohibited. This brings up the first aspect of AI being presented by the movie: future civilizations will rely heavily on AI, but, as stated in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series, humans fear intelligent robots that can’t be controlled. Thus, each replicant comes with a four-year expiration date, and Blade Runners like Rick Deckard are employed to hunt and kill replicants. Such dependency in our future, coupled with the paranoia, can be detrimental both to humans and the intelligent robots. Those robots have the reasoning capability of a human, and we humans would object the ungrateful treatments the replicants receive. That said, the second aspect presented in the movie is up for analysis.

As explained in the analysis of Chobits and Doraemon, Blade Runner also has the theme of distinction between human and robots. Whereas Chobits and Doraemon focus on human relationship with robots, Blade Runner has a heavier emphasis on the replicants’ memories and feelings. The movie portrayed the two aspects very well, so it is better to see the clips for yourself:

And the most well-done scene in the movie, where a replicant grieves his memories going to waste as he dies:

While Blade Runner depicted the service replicants as being hateful toward humans for the thankless reliance, the movie Wall-E gives us a different take on robotic-reliance, or perhaps, robotic-overreliance. The following clip sums up the dependency of passengers in a starship, which is a megastructure:

We also see the recurring theme of humans sending intelligent robots to distance place for manual labor (in this case the abandoned Earth):

Overreliance on robots is a common theme in literature, and both Blade Runner and Wall-E give two different possible outcomes of such dependency. Moreover, Blade Runner also questions what makes humans humans and robots robots—or whether such distinction is even necessary. These dilemmas will surely become relevant when AI is as advanced as depicted in these two masterpieces.