Fast-forward 30 years in Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, replicants are still utilized for slave labor and hunting their own kind, now farmed synthetically and tweaked to be more subservient to human will. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the illegal landing of a group of six renegade replicants on Earth is what triggers the return of Deckard from retirement, as Captain Bryant asks him to ‘retire’ four of these replicants as his assignment. In both the source material and the movies, humanity is defined as much by its lack of empathy towards replicants as by other redeeming qualities. Blade Runner examines the fabric of what it means to be human and raises salient questions about injustice, slavery, power, and xenophobia that runs rampant beneath the noir trappings of a dystopian future. The man-machine dilemma has been an age-old one, especially with ongoing advancements in the realm of artificial intelligence, and the probability of achieving ‘singularity’, wherein AI systems can accelerate/self-improve at alarming rates and reach levels of self-sufficiency like never before.
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The manufacture of replicants was introduced in the year 2000 within the cyberpunk-ish world of Blade Runner, helmed by Tyrell Corporation, whose ‘Nexus’ series was virtually indistinguishable from that of adult humans. Dick’s sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which, these bioengineered entities were referred to as ‘androids’ or ‘andies’.
Replicants have always been central to the Blade Runner franchise, which was adapted from Philip K. A total of 10 replicants appear throughout Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, each meeting a distinct fate and impacting the narrative in terms of their actions and what happened to them.