Search

» » Blade Runner's dystopian future: Are we living in it?

Blade Runner's dystopian future: Are we living in it?

Climate change? Income disparity? Flying cars? Humanoid robots?

When director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Blade Runner hit theatres in 1982, it presented viewers with a futuristic society set in Los Angeles in 2019.

Loosely based on the 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, the film’s imagined future depicts a dystopian city suffering from widespread poverty, overcrowding and perpetual rain. On the brighter side, the film also predicts technological advancements such as, flying cars or “Spinners,” humanoid robots called replicants, and artificial intelligence demonstrated by the replicants.

As 2019 quickly approaches and the movie’s sequel Blade Runner 2049 opens today, it may be worth posing the question: how close are we to living in Scott’s vision of the future?

According to Richard Worzel, a self-described “futurist” and member of the World Future Society, we’re well on our way.

“We’ve made progress on all of it, if progress is the right word,” he told CTV News Channel on Friday. “A lot of the things that were talked about in Blade Runner are actually happening.”

Evidence of climate change is well documented, the income gap has widened as the movie predicted, and prototypes for flying cars are being developed, Worzel said. However, unlike the nimble ‘spinners’ in Blade Runner, the flying cars of real-life 2017 are expensive and “fundamentally an incompetent version of a car and a plane,” he clarified.

Worzel also points to advances in robotics, particularly humanoid sex robots, as another example of real-life approximating the original film.

One particular point of interest for Worzel is the appearance of artificial intelligence in the first film and how that’s been popularized in reality. From Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa to robots such as “Pepper” that can listen and respond, artificial intelligence is becoming more commonplace. Worzel believes that, eventually, artificial intelligence will be everywhere.

“It’s not just going to be in robots,” he predicted. “It’s going to surround us in every possible way and that’s both creepy and reassuring.”

The futurist said he’s looking forward to seeing how the latest film Blade Runner 2049 portrays artificial intelligence because he believes there are both pros and cons to its development.

“You begin to understand that, although the benefits can be valuable, not all of the things that happen because of technology are good,” Worzer cautioned. “In fact, I tell people there’s no such thing as a one-edged sword when it comes to technology. There are problems with all of it.”

Let's block ads! (Why?)



Read More http://ift.tt/2yNcyAO

Bagikan Berita Ini

0 Response to "Blade Runner's dystopian future: Are we living in it?"

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Powered by Blogger.