The bike lights and blood of Blade Runner

So I finally got round to watching Blade Runner.   Ridley Scott was wrong about the bike lights.  By 2019, LED technology had massively improved headlights, so that they actually cast enough light to see where you are going.  The cyclists in soggy downtown LA in Blade Runner were using bog standard 1980s filament bulb bike lights.  You would have struggled to buy the D cell batteries for these in 2019.

I don’t suppose many cinema goers would have spotted this gaping flaw in the 1982 oscar-winning visual effects.  However, most viewers of Blade Runner (or readers of the 1968 Philip K. Dick Novel ‘Do Androids dream of electric sheep’ on which it is based) will have noted that the dystopian fantasy of convincing humanoid robots still has not come to pass. 

In 2025 A.I. machines are getting super-good at mathematical and linguistic modelling and medics are developing some wonderful nerve-activated prostheses. Deep Blue did beat Gary Kasparov in 2019, Paro the robotic seal is bringing genuine emotional comfort to dementia sufferers in Japan and A.I. generated characters are tickling the hormones of lusty teenage boys all over the West.  Even so, you will not mistake a robot for a doctor, a chess player, a pensioner or a teenager at the bus stop. Cut an android in half and there will be sparks, but there will be no blood.   

Even at a purely material level, human beings are fantastically complicated body-mind amalgams.  A solo human being can turn cornflakes into a world-changing idea.  In collaboration, humans can transform continents for better or worse.   For all the talk about us just being naked apes, Homo sapiens are uniquely creative, relational and intelligent.   As the Psalmist put it, we’re ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’.

I don’t believe we are purely material.  Personality seems to me to be so much more than the sum of its parts.  The more humans I see, (and the more funerals I conduct) the more I see a longing for the transcendent which defies material explanation.   The bible says that unlike every other creature we’re made in God’s image.  Made to represent him, to rule over the earth and to relate to him.   We long for Him, and are capable of knowing Him and living for Him.  This is how I roll.  If you are human I recommend it, if not, bot, the option is not open to you. 

For fair reasons or foul, we might want to create convincing humanoid robots, but we are a very long way off.  Ridley Scott was wrong about both the bike lights and the blooded bots.  He was right about our mortality and about the need to make the most of life though.    

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.  Psalm 90:12