Ten Years to Tanhauser Gate

It recently occurred to me that, for a blog professing to discuss science fiction (among other things), there's been very little in the way of the speculative genre here so far. Sure, I've made references to movies and books here and there, but only in so far as they emphasize my central point. Well, I've decided to remedy that. I'm going to muse about Blade Runner, which I've seen a number of times but recently watched again last weekend. I'd like to make this into a semi-regular feature in which I examine science fiction stories through the lens of my particular brand of futurism, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

To begin, I want to address what many consider to be the central mystery behind this film: Is Deckard a replicant? The answer: It doesn't matter. It's not important to the story being told. I'd even go so far as to argue that the very fact there is ambiguity over whether or not Deckard is a replicant demonstrates that it doesn't matter; people still enjoy and find meaning in the film even without knowing.

So, for the time being, let's set aside that question and explore a few other issues. Watching Rachael realize that her memories had been fabricated, Batty coming to have compassion for Deckard, and Deckard falling in love with Rachael, I remembered a line in Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, which was, essentially, "When machines tell us they're conscious, we'll believe them." I was originally skeptical reading that, mostly because I believe I'll still be skeptical when machines start mimicking us.

But what Blade Runner does very well as a film is to show how universal and constant some of humanity's traits are (to humans, anyway): the desire to be loved, to live a meaningful life, and to be remembered. Rachael might not be perfectly human, but it doesn't matter, because in a dark and dying world like the one we see in Blade Runner, Deckard wants very badly just to connect to someone. And likewise, Batty's impassioned, if short monologue at the end of the movie is intended to convince us and Deckard that replicants are worthy of some degree of humanity.

Now, you might argue that the replicants in Blade Runner are not machines, being as how they are genetically engineered organisms and not electronic robots. But I hardly think this distinction matters where it concerns our attitude toward our creations. Humans are already quite capable of professing sympathy for the artificial, so I'm skeptical that humanoid robots would be treated much differently than engineered replicants. What roboticists and computer scientists have yet to convince us of is that human-like creations are human, but they're getting close.

All of this brings us back to what might as well have been Dick's version of the Turing Test, the Voight-Kampff Test. From his slightly warped perspective, however, the machine is used not to elevate but to discriminate. The blade runners of the film run the Voight-Kampff to single out those that are lacking in empathy (especially, in the book, toward animals). Humans have a long history of labeling our enemies as "inhuman" and hating them for it, and here Blade Runner is more allegory than science fiction. It is interesting that we often inflict far greater cruelty and malice on those that appear not quite human than those that are not human at all.

What the film demonstrates, however, is that humans treat as human those that we feel to be so. Empathic connections are more important to us than clinical definitions, and if we want something to appear human, it is. From this perspective, the unresolved question of Deckard's humanity may be more meaningful if left so. Whether Deckard was created in a test tube or born in a hospital, if we empathize with him, then he is human. This mirrors his view of Rachael, after all.

But that leaves us with one niggling doubt, which the film does not fail to explore. The replicants we see in Blade Runner are not human-like but superhuman. They are faster, stronger, and capable of seeing things no human would believe. As a humanoid creation becomes more and more human, we are less and less inclined to trust it, thinking it a deception or an impostor of some sort. But once our creations begin to emote in recognizable fashions, all of that mistrust will disappear, and when they tell us they can feel, we'll believe them. What happens, however, once they surpass us? What will humans do when the fear is not that their creations are not quite human, but that they are far better than a human ever could be?

Blade Runner, bleak as always, paints a dim picture. The institutions of humankind, which - athough they are made up of humans - possess almost no humanity, are relentless in finding and destroying rogue replicants. Tyrell, the replicants' creator, plays God and seems to have no qualms with enslaving and deceiving his creations.

And with all the hysteria that exists in science fiction of machines run amok, could we blame ourselves (or our descendants) for reacting similarly? Will we have the wisdom to learn from our artificial progeny, or will we fear being left behind? And what rights will we grant our betters? If animals - viewed to be less than human - are afforded fewer rights, would not superintelligent robots be deserving of more rights? I doubt very many of us will see it that way.

Of course, none of this is new. The speculative genre has been probing these questions since its inception. But we are now only a decade away from the year in which Blade Runner is set. We may not have off-world colonies or genetically engineered humans, but we do have robots in our houses and AIs in our banks. Soon, the hypothetical questions of science fiction will become actual.

Lamenting Science Fiction's Failures

My genre of choice, science fiction, has given a lot to the world. It is the red-headed stepchild of literature, but it is responsible for important cautionary tales, cultural and political allegories, and discussions of the human condition. Aside from these social services, science fiction has also contributed a long list of now ubiquitous words to our technological lexicon.

From Karel Čapek’s robots in 1921, to Heinlein’s grok, Gibson’s cyberspace, Vinge’s singularity, and even including less well attributed terms such as hyperspace and meatspace, or phasers and warp drive from Star Trek, science fiction has a record of introducing terms - and sometimes ideas - to the world before the rest of us have found suitable syllables. And this is an important function. Without science fiction's anticipatory naming, novel ideas thrust upon us by confused science reporters acquire clumsy monikers that sometimes have the misfortune of standing the test of time.

But science fiction is not perfect, and there is one particular domain that crept up on us so quickly and changed us so profoundly that all but a few of the most prophetic science fiction writers failed to see it coming: this here internet. The revolution of personal computing and the interconnectedness that followed blindsided many a science fiction writer, leading to Asimov's room-sized computers in a future galactic empire or Back to the Future Part II's preponderance of fax machines.

Because of this collective failure of the science fiction genre to foresee the internet, the neologisms that arose to describe it are some of the worst created by the human imagination. The earliest incarnation of these terrible descriptors is probably "the information superhighway," for whom we have the internet's inventor, Al Gore, to thank. Fortunately, humanity's decreasing attention span discarded this bloated appellation; unfortunately, the trend swung too far in other direction, giving rise to a series of awkward portmanteaus that persist to this day: netizen, webisode, infornography, etc. There are a few good ones, such as podcasting and emoticon, but the vast majority are tacky and superficial.

The worst one of all, of course, which I'm sure anyone reading this meandering monologue has already guessed, is blog. An amalgam of web and log, this term is used to describe the publishing of anyone's inane inner thoughts onto the internet. In the mid to late 90s when this medium of expression was just beginning, there were plenty of common synonyms for blog - journal, post, diary, site, page - but none of them managed to catch on. Perhaps they were too mundane to be ascribed to what many considered to be a new and important form of communication.

Nevertheless, blog stuck and it has spawned further linguistic monstrosities from its loins: blogger, blogging, blogosphere, blogrolls, moblog, etc.; the list goes on. This term is serviceable when used as a truncated word to ease internet communication, but it has broken free of that role in a way that lol and n00b never have. Now newscasters and journalists spew this ugly creation with every report, clinging desperately to any semblance of modernity and relevance in an environment in which breaking news is so last week before the talking heads have time to reapply their makeup.

Alas, this being the internet - where everyone is given a chance to voice their unique worldview - I'm a little late to the scene. A quick googling of I hate the word blog reveals that many others have embarked on this rant before me, and some have even done it better than I. Nonetheless, this futile rebellion against our memetic culture and an acknowledgment of the limitations of a genre I hold dear to my heart shall serve as an introduction to protoPosthuman. I'm an avid science fiction fan, a writer, a gamer, a philosopher, and a futurist, and I've decided that it's time to unleash my particular brand of cynicism on the internet.

This is my blog.

Tune in next time for a radical proposition regarding the impending technological singularity!