Comment on ways that the film Blade Runner predicted the future.

I agree with what Jonathan said about the societal views portrayed in the movie Blade Runner. I would like to take it a step further though, and look at the portrayal of the future in most film.

In Bladrunner, we saw a run down environment. There were the super wealthy (aka the creator) who lived above the pollution and had sunlight, and the common people who had spotlights and rain. There was a strict industrialized theme throughout the city, similar to the big city stereotype. This movie was made in 1982.

Prior to Blade Runner was Metropolis, a film made in 1927. Although made 55 years prior, the two share very similar characteristics. Again we see a strong class system. This is represented symbolically via the upper class living above ground, and the worker class living in the catacombs below. The future is represented as dependency to technology. For example, if someone were not to operate the clock underground, then the machines would fail and horrible things would happen. We see this dependency to technology fear appear time and time again. Again we have a movie where the antagonist is a computer agent, but represented under the guise of flesh. Is the fear representational of technology, or of ubiquitous/ambient technology.

In modern day we see Pixar Studio's animation Wall•E. In this movie we see the aftermath of non-sustainable societal practices. In this film the technology is represented inversely to the established prescience. In prior films, technological agents resembled human form, but lacked emotion. In Wall•E, the characters exhibit emotional attributes while retaining a technological appearance. In this movie we see the human characters being assisted by robot technology to create a nirvana state, but eventually the established fear is realized when the technology gains control of the humans and develops individual rationale.

The underlying plot is technology taking over mankind, mankind fighting back to once again hold administrative position. Is this a media fear or an actual scientific fear? At what point do everyday technological components become competitors instead of utilities? Is it the actual technology or the idea of artificial knowledge/reasoning that induces fear?

In terms of artificial knowledge, the primary barrier used is to develop human implemented limitations to technology. Whether it's life spans, or kill switches (most robots in movies media have kill switches/self destruct codes) there seems to be some limitation to the technology. What makes this technology so dangerous? Is it the fear that we might create something smarter than us? If that's the case, what makes us so sure they can't reverse engineer itself through recursive analysis to counteract the limitations? If humans can reverse engineer software/restrictions (see CCS and DRM algorithms), how hard would it be to create a synthetic date at runtime to overwrite age value checks? Or simulate communication between components to spoof data transactions?