Blade Runner - When science fiction becomes fact

Now that the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, is here to remind us of the greatness of the original (and the many director’s cuts), let’s take a look at how much of its science-fiction tech, from way back in 1982, has come true in our lives – and in our cars – in 2018.

Called ‘spinners’, Blade Runner’s flying cars are driven exclusively by the police force or the wealthy elite who can acquire licences through power and money while the rest of the population scurries along at street level. Spinners use jet propulsion and VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) to fly – like a Harrier jet – but they also drive, like a car, on the ground.

It feels as if flying cars – like personal jet packs – have been promised forever, but how close are we to driving to the cafe to pick up a latte before taking to the sky and flying to work? Some companies are pushing this dream along. Current frontrunners in the race to get flying cars off the, er, ground are Terrafugia and Aeromobil. Even their promo videos are a bit like watching Blade Runner, if you squint. Let’s not forget, too, that Uber says we’ll be flying the skies in their Uber Elevate taxis in the near future – 2020, they claim. Airbus thinks it’s onto something with its Pop.Up concept, while the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum posits that flying cars will be less like cars and more like drones shuttling people about, like the Ehang 184.

In 2049, you probably noticed that less-than-subtle product placement in a few scenes (IT’S A PEUGEOT!). Could this be a clue that Peugeot is about to launch a devised-in-secret flying car? No, probably not – it’s more likely to coincide with the rumoured return of the French car-maker to the American market. Peugeots haven’t been sold in the US since 1991.

As if in celebration of the prophecy in the first film, in the opening scene of Blade Runner 2049 we see Officer K’s eye open, awaking, in his self-driving-and-flying police car en route to take out Sapper Morton, a Nexus-8 Replicant. As we know, at the same time as electric cars slowly take over our roads, self-driving cars are on their way, almost inevitably, as soon as the world figures out the best way to implement the technology.

In a famous scene in Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) uses voice commands to direct a computer to enhance an image in search of valuable clues. The Commodore 64 was released in 1982, but voice commands to edit digital imagery were still decades away. Just this year, Hyundai announced it is teaming up with Google Assistant to integrate Google Home with their cars. From the comfort of your air-conditioned lounge room, you’ll be able to tell Google Home to start your car and set the air conditioner to the perfect temperature.

Let’s not forget how much Siri and its equivalents are becoming a part of our driving lives, thanks to voice-command integration straight from our cars’ dashboards. More on that coming up!

Twenty-one years before Skype was launched, Rick Deckard ducked over to a phone booth and placed a video call to Rachael, an experimental Nexus-6 Replicant he was supposed to ‘retire’ but fell in love with. Video calling, Snapchatting and Instagram-storying are normal today – we’re putting our faces in video everywhere. But what about in cars? Seems dangerous, right? It is. Early in 2017, Volvo teased us by claiming to have added Skype to their vehicles. Of course, this can’t be done until cars are completely self-driving and the driver can’t be distracted by their bestie’s face in the dash.

Fun fact: back in the day, if you asked an older version of Apple’s Siri ‘What’s Blade Runner about?’, it would have responded with sass: ‘It’s about intelligent assistants wanting to live beyond their termination dates. That doesn’t sound like too much to ask.’ Cheeky.

Siri, Alexa and Cortana are all over our cars today, but Blade Runner’s use of AI, whether it’s in replicants or technological devices, was 35 years ago. Today we use Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto – with a sentience created by implanted memories, as in Blade Runner – as if they’ve been with us forever.

Replicants, bio-engineered androids created by humans to fulfil human tasks – essentially servants and slaves – are central to the Blade Runner narrative. The pre-history for the first film is that as replicants became more advanced, they soon cottoned on to their situation and led a mutiny. Since the mutiny, they are now illegal, and it’s the job of a blade runner – Harrison Ford in the first, and Ryan Gosling in 2049 – to ‘retire’ them.

A scary side effect of teaching computers to learn is the currently hypothetical (thankfully!) concept called ‘technological singularity’. The theory of technological singularity states that when artificial intelligence becomes super-intelligent, it just might start thinking for itself. AI ‘beings’ – whether they’re a Siri app, your laptop computer, your car or even your fancy new android housekeeper – just might run away with their own ideas and develop their own philosophies about how they want to exist. Some scientists believe this could result in a real-life uprising, just like the replicants in Blade Runner…

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