Chapter 11 - Mere Data Makes a Man: Artificial Intelligences in Blade Runner 2049

Summary

Mere data makes a man. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you. All from four symbols. I am only two: 1 and 0.

Joi, Blade Runner 2049

Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts become technologically reproducible.

Friedrich Kittler (1999: 11)

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) uses the manner with which near-future technology recreates or feigns consciousness to present a wider discourse around notions of identity, memory, and the formulation of the self and subjectivity. The franchise, which began in 1982 with Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), has grown to include three short film stories commissioned by Villeneuve to dramatise moments that take place after the 2019 setting of the original film and before the events of his feature-length sequel, occuring thirty years later. These include the anime Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (Shinichiro Wantabe 2017) and two live-action in-world shorts: 2036: Nexus Dawn (Luke Scott 2017) and 2048: Nowhere to Run (Luke Scott 2017). Each of these works share similar values, with the short films detailing events significant in Villeneuve’s sequel and, to one extent or another, exploring the impact of technological change on society and the anchoring of individual and collective identities to digital or organic memories. This chapter considers how Villeneuve’s film represents machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) as a biocapitalist discourse that considers the philosophical and ethical impacts of real-world applications of technology and the expression of biopolitical power.

COMMON THEMES OF BLADE RUNNER

The Blade Runner cinematic universe is orientated around three themes: (1) the development, use, and exploitation of technology; (2) the ethics related to the deployment of this technology by members of the public and corporations; and (3) an exploration of the nature of what constitutes consciousness specifically related to AI and bioengineered technology. In BR 2049, these are made manifest through two key characters. K (Ryan Gosling) is the ninth generation of Nexus Replicants, organic lifeforms biologically engineered by the Wallace Corporation. K is an indentured servant of the Los Angeles Police Department tasked to track and ‘retire’ – a euphemism used in the franchise for the killing of earlier models of Replicant.