Blade Runner 2049 [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

JoshL

2017-09-29, 09:59 AM

Honestly, I'm just glad Scott isn't doing it. Once upon a time, he was one of my favorite directors. Legend is still, my favorite movie, and with Alien, Blade Runner, the Duelists and Thelma & Louise, he certainly did more than a good number of classics. But I haven't been super crazy about anything he's done since Gladiator (I like the new Aliens and the Martian okay, just don't love them. And Black Hawk Down is a good movie, just not my cup of tea). So I like the world, and the concepts, the original film is brilliant, and while a sequel isn't necessary, I'm interested in giving it a shot. Looks beautiful.

Color me intruigued. I am a big fan of Denis Villeneuve's sci fi work (plus, he is a fellow Quebecois conpatriot). Arrival was brilliant, i WILL see this movie, and i am already excited for Villeneuve's Dune project.

I am definitely on board for this. I would love to see a really good Dune. I enjoy the Lynch and tv adaptations for what they are, but neither are really great adaptations. I also hope he can do the whole thing, because I think it really picks up steam in book 4. Also, I'd like to see a better writer do the two post-Frank books. I love how the story ends, but the actual writing is painfully bad in those!

paddyfool

2017-09-29, 10:07 AM

I'd agree with Cykomar - if you refused to ever see sequels or reboots, you'd be missing out on a lot of good movies, from Empire Strikes Back and Aliens to Fury Road. 90% of sequels/reboots of good movies are cr**, but 90% of everything is cr**. This would seem to fall into the other 10%.

On another note in this thread, I really liked the Martian, but I think all the seeds of genius in that movie were planted in the original book. However, I gave up on the alien movies after Prometheus.

Scowling Dragon

2017-09-29, 01:13 PM

This is a Dogma.

For me its principle. Some things just need to end for an end experience.
Ends are important in it of themselves. Otherwise, it will become used up throwaway entertainment, and begin to damage themselves as a whole.

Tolkien could have made the sequels to the LOTR stories, but mostly threw them out because he felt that no matter when they would just altogether ruin the collective. And he was right.

Blade Runner is a story that DOES NOT NEED A SEQUEL

Cikomyr

2017-09-29, 02:25 PM

For me its principle. Some things just need to end for an end experience.
Ends are important in it of themselves.

I kind of agree with your premise. Ends are important things. This is why i dislike when an ended story gets dragged along, eventually ruining the point of the original story. Ex: the Matrix Sequels

However, this isnt what is happening. This is not a continuation/dragging of the original Blade Runner.. its a new story, merely using the setting (and some character) of the original. Think like Aliens. Or maybe Toy Story 2. Or The Road Warrior/Fury Road.

DanyBallon

2017-09-29, 02:37 PM

For me its principle. Some things just need to end for an end experience.
Ends are important in it of themselves. Otherwise, it will become used up throwaway entertainment, and begin to damage themselves as a whole.

Tolkien could have made the sequels to the LOTR stories, but mostly threw them out because he felt that no matter when they would just altogether ruin the collective. And he was right.

Blade Runner is a story that DOES NOT NEED A SEQUEL

I kind of agree with your premise. Ends are important things. This is why i dislike when an ended story gets dragged along, eventually ruining the point of the original story. Ex: the Matrix Sequels

However, this isnt what is happening. This is not a continuation/dragging of the original Blade Runner.. its a new story, merely using the setting (and some character) of the original. Think like Aliens. Or maybe Toy Story 2. Or The Road Warrior/Fury Road.

I agree with Cikomir. I you want to use a Middle Earth analogy, it would be like if you wouldn't read LotR because the Hobbit happened before.
Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 are in the same setting but take place at different moment in the storyline, and elements of the original leads to the recent movie, the same as the Hobbit set things in place for LotR.

Scowling Dragon

2017-09-29, 02:41 PM

However, this isnt what is happening. This is not a continuation/dragging of the original Blade Runner.. its a new story, merely using the setting (and some character) of the original. Think like Aliens. Or maybe Toy Story 2. Or The Road Warrior/Fury Road.

So...A Sequel. What you described is pretty much 100% a sequel.

And certain things benefit from expansion and certain things don't. Aliens is a fun movie, but if you where a fan of Alien as Alien, then Aliens was a deep betrayal of it as a film. Then it burn't itself out and is a giant pile of garbage.
Blade Runner is, even MORE, thinking and a rare type of movie. It would be a massive Shame for Blade Runner to Blade Runners.

What I mean, is that Blade Runner is much more self-contained. It doesn't need expansion. Its topics don't need followup, and the questions it didn't answer where unanswered intentionally.

I agree with Cikomir. I you want to use a Middle Earth analogy, it would be like if you wouldn't read LotR because the Hobbit happened before.

I didn't go See the Hobbit because I already Saw LOTR.
And it turned out to be tired pap.

The best sequels don't come out 20 years after the fact by different directors.

Potatomade

2017-09-29, 02:49 PM

What I mean, is that Blade Runner is much more self-contained. It doesn't need expansion. Its topics don't need followup, and the questions it didn't answer where unanswered intentionally.

Godfather Part II.

I agree that there are lots of movies that absolutely don't need sequels, and maybe shouldn't have them. I can't imagine what a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Fail Safe would be like, and in any case I would be wary of a late sequel to a classic (ex.: Godfather Part III). But being automatically hostile to sequels to good movies is silly.

Cikomyr

2017-09-29, 03:00 PM

So...A Sequel. What you described is pretty much 100% a sequel.

...yhea. i mean.. was i trying not to?

And certain things benefit from expansion and certain things don't. Aliens is a fun movie, but if you where a fan of Alien as Alien, then Aliens was a deep betrayal of it as a film. Then it burn't itself out and is a giant pile of garbage.

You are contradicting yourself. Is Aliens a fun movie, or a burned piece of garbage?

And you impose a rather subjective judgement on Aliens. Deciding that it betrays the original. Who are you to make that call? What measures do you take?

You know what is betrayal of the original story? Highlander 2. Men in Black 2. Anything that invalidates the point of the orginal movie.

I didn't go See the Hobbit because I already Saw LOTR.
And it turned out to be tired pap.

Fun fact: Lord of the Rings is a sequel to The Hobbit

The best sequels don't come out 20 years after the fact by different directors.

You are right. They are done by the same director, same author and same writer as the original, shortly after the fact.

I think you can agree that The Lost World is WAYYY better than Jurassic World.

Cikomyr

2017-09-29, 03:04 PM

Godfather Part II.

I agree that there are lots of movies that absolutely don't need sequels, and maybe shouldn't have them. I can't imagine what a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Fail Safe would be like, and in any case I would be wary of a late sequel to a classic (ex.: Godfather Part III). But being automatically hostile to sequels to good movies is silly.

You know, you could make a fantastic dramatic sequel following Close Encounter.

One that actually addresses Spielberg's main point of contention with the movie: nowaday, he thinks the protagonist was wrong to abandon his family.

You could make an entire story around that. Have the man come back and deal with the consequences of his actions. Make a great dramatic story akin to a man who abandonned his own family for Religious Enligtenment, and then must deal with the irresponsibility of his action.

You don't invalidate the original movie. You enhance the world in which it was set.

comicshorse

2017-09-29, 03:06 PM

The best sequels don't come out 20 years after the fact by different directors.

No, they come out 17 years after the original by a different director :smallcool:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343727/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Potatomade

2017-09-29, 03:08 PM

You know, you could make a fantastic dramatic sequel following Close Encounter.

One that actually addresses Spielberg's main point of contention with the movie: nowaday, he thinks the protagonist was wrong to abandon his family.

You could make an entire story around that. Have the man come back and deal with the consequences of his actions. Make a great dramatic story akin to a man who abandonned his own family for Religious Enligtenment, and then must deal with the irresponsibility of his action.

You don't invalidate the original movie. You enhance the world in which it was set.

Eh, that'd make me feel kinda bummed watching the original, though. Close Encounters needs to have a childlike wonder about it. That's why Spielberg wanted "When You Wish Upon a Star" to be the theme song so badly. A sequel shouldn't make you feel bad when watching the original, even if the sequel itself is well-done.

Cikomyr

2017-09-29, 03:12 PM

No, they come out 17 years after the original by a different director :smallcool:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343727/?ref_=nv_sr_1

But that wasnt a sequel...

Cikomyr

2017-09-29, 03:13 PM

Eh, that'd make me feel kinda bummed watching the original, though. Close Encounters needs to have a childlike wonder about it. That's why Spielberg wanted "When You Wish Upon a Star" to be the theme song so badly. A sequel shouldn't make you feel bad when watching the original, even if the sequel itself is well-done.

Damn.. maybe..

Still. I cant watch Close Encounter without thinking the guy is an family-abandoning *******

Potatomade

2017-09-29, 03:16 PM

To be fair, his wife was extremely unsupportive. And it's kinda hard to fight off psychic compulsion from aliens that probably don't fully understand the human family unit (ex: kidnapping that lady's child).

Scowling Dragon

2017-09-29, 08:20 PM

...yhea. i mean.. was i trying not to?
Yes

This is not a continuation/dragging of the original Blade Runner.
Which it exactly is

You are contradicting yourself. Is Aliens a fun movie, or a burned piece of garbage?
Sorry, its to do with the Titles. ALIENS is a fun movie but ALIEN as a SERIES is a burn't out husk,

And you impose a rather subjective judgement on Aliens. Deciding that it betrays the original. Who are you to make that call? What measures do you take?
Because the original was a much more stark horror, and the sequel was a Action Horror film.

Anything that invalidates the point of the orginal movie.
And you impose a rather subjective judgement on Highlander 2. Deciding that it betrays the original. Who are you to make that call? What measures do you take?
:smallwink:

Fun fact: Lord of the Rings is a sequel to The Hobbit
Made within a relatively short period of time, and wasn't split into 3 parts because he wanted to recoup investment risk.

I think you can agree that The Lost World is WAYYY better than Jurassic World.
I guess, so on a flat technical level but can I simply not bother with them at all?

Sure, by statistical probabilities keep making sequels and you will get lucky. But why this desire?

People complain about sequels but keep demanding them is the truth. Every piece of Garbage that Hollywood makes it makes because people DEMAND IT.

smuchmuch

2017-09-30, 09:03 AM

I have to agree Blade runner doesn't need a sequel. it is perfectly good self contained storry on its own.
Ifthey do anage to make a good film put of continuing it, great, tho. But the fact is that experience with 'sequels' such as this has been generaly negative and I fully understand people being warry of it.

You can say 'it's dogmatic' and you should try it before you judge it' but here's the problem, at least in the first couple of monthes:
To see the movie,Ii need to paya the ticket. And even if it happens to disike it, even if a mjority of people who saw it dislike it, they alrady payed, th profit is made. and a enough opening week, even based on curiosity alone will send the message that yes, this is what the kind of movie people wants, or at least what's profitable.
As such, yes it is reasonable not to want to see a movie at all if you feel it'll be bad r t least wait untill first opiions and critics rolls in

(I also fully agree that Aliens (or alien 2 ) if you will was was compellety off comapred to the first movie spirirt by turning a goood horor film into an action, bleh.
But hey if you enjoy it, tht's greayt, no accounting for taste.)

Fun fact: Lord of the Rings is a sequel to The Hobbit

It started that way but clearly sprawled ito something much more that was very much it's own thing.
ou can read Lord of the rig without having read the Hobbit andit perfectly stnd on it's own given how little recuring elements there are.

DanyBallon

2017-09-30, 09:26 AM

It started that way but clearly sprawled ito something much more that was very much it's own thing.
ou can read Lord of the rig without having read the Hobbit andit perfectly stnd on it's own given how little recuring elements there are.

It's the whole point about Blade Runner 2049. It's as much a sequel to the original Blade Runner as LotR is a sequel to the Hobbit. Both are stand alone in the same universe, using a few recurring characters.

paddyfool

2017-09-30, 10:41 AM

Let's get back to the point: critics are raving about this film (98% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blade_runner_2049/).

From what I've read of the reviews while avoiding spoilers as much as possible, it sounds like this wowed them on plot, characterisation, visual spectacle and universe building all at once. I'm definitely interested.

Cikomyr

2017-09-30, 11:38 AM

Agreed! Those who dont want to see the movie/rant about sequels, you are invited to start your own thread.

I am awaiting MovieBob's review with impatience. Almost all critics say good thing about the movie, and claim its worthy to be compared to.the original. Maybe not challenge it, but compared with.

Scowling Dragon

2017-09-30, 04:01 PM

Agreed! Those who dont want to see the movie/rant about sequels, you are invited to start your own thread.

Why? Well actually I KNOW why. Because most people don't like things they like/ enjoy being viewed critically. Most people can only have something be perfect, or with flaws they can rationalize away, instead of examining the possibility of maybe flaws with the core concepts, or that even aspects they adore, have flaws hard built into them, so acnowledging the product as a whole would also require assesing its flaws.
I don't even Take Reviewer Aggregates very seriously anymore, as they are still pretty colored by hype. Avatar Remains at 80+ Percent and I believe it was even higher before.

I find a reviewer who I think does a good in-depth job, and then stick with them. I ususally never feel comfortable purchasing a product if it only gets lavish praise because that often is tied in with hype.

Edit: Heck Prometheus stands at 72% (With a much higher initial score). Take quality, not quantity.

Cikomyr

2017-09-30, 07:54 PM

Why? Well actually I KNOW why.

Except you are not looking at Blade Runner 2049 critically.

Hell, you are not even looking at it.

You are just randomly rambling about sequels in general. You can do that elsewhere, because it is clear you have nothing to contribute to the thread's topic: Blade Runner 2049.

Scowling Dragon

2017-09-30, 09:02 PM

Hell, you are not even looking at it.
Well, neither are you because it hasn't been released yet.

The reviewer that I valued made it out as visually stunning but without much depth.
But Talking about what reviewers said is pretty pointless overall.

Chromascope3D

2017-10-01, 12:12 AM

I'm not going to see this film because it's a needless sequel to one of my favorite films; I am going to see it because I like Villenueve as a director, and want to support him whether he is doing an original work (as all of his prior films have been), or one of an existing IP (as this one is).

Not to mention the marvelous tie-in anime (http://www.crunchyroll.com/blade-runner-black-out-2022/blade-runner-black-out-2022-blade-runner-black-out-2022-748417) that honestly sealed the deal for me on seeing this film.

Hopeless

2017-10-01, 04:31 AM

So is it any good?

Cikomyr

2017-10-01, 07:47 AM

So is it any good?

Well, more people (critics) who saw it so far say yes.

Wr have to wait until Friday :)

Anonymouswizard

2017-10-01, 10:20 AM

Edit: Heck Prometheus stands at 72% (With a much higher initial score). Take quality, not quantity.

Eh, take it out of the Alien universe and I enjoyed Prometheus (I also enjoyed Alien: Covenant, but found it to be weaker than it's predecessor). I thin Prometheus would have worked much better as a standalone film with some of the same ideas as the Alien universe, but I don't begrudge a film because it's been put into a canon it shouldn't be in.

(In other words, I think Covenant is the better Alien film, but if Prometheus had been stand alone it would have been the better film.)

For Blade Runner 2049, my parents might drag me along to see it (I need to get a job and move out), otherwise I won't. I didn't find the original Blade Runner that brilliant, enjoyable until the final showdown but not as good as the cyberpunk books I was reading that year (Neuromancer and Snow Crash). Maybe it was just who I was at that time, but I don't like the film enough to seek out a sequel to something that had a satisfying ending.

(On the other hand, if it's the same universe but a rather different film I might be interested, because there's nothing I hate more than a retread*)

* I'm also that weirdo who thinks The Road Warrior was better than Fury Road, but I found FR to just have too much action. I like talky films.

Cikomyr

2017-10-01, 11:33 AM

* I'm also that weirdo who thinks The Road Warrior was better than Fury Road, but I found FR to just have too much action. I like talky films.

I lik both. Cant decide which is better.

But i wouldnt define Road Warrior as "talky" :smallbiggrin:

Tyndmyr

2017-10-02, 11:12 AM

Strictly speaking, when discussing movies, LotR is *not* a sequel to the Hobbit. The books are not the movies. A "avoid sequel tales" rule would have resulted in not seeing the Hobbit trilogy.

I won't say that all sequels are bad, and I have hope for this one, but I think a certain degree of skepticism is warranted for sequels in general. The general rule of thumb for most very popular properties is to keep cranking out movies until no more money can be made. This pretty much guarantees that at least one awful sequel will be made. Possibly more.

Anonymouswizard

2017-10-02, 01:35 PM

I lik both. Cant decide which is better.

But i wouldnt define Road Warrior as "talky" :smallbiggrin:

Not talky, but it definitely had slower moments.

My problems with Fury Road are 1) it's a slightly different version of The Road Warrior, and 2) it's essentially two long action scenes. It didn't even have the great twist of The Road Warrior, and is certainly lackng in the build up department.

Not that I think Fury Road is a bad FILM, I think it's a bad SEQUEL, and looking The Road Warrior more is just personal preference.

If taken as a reboot of the 'post apocalyptic' Mad Max films (so 2+) it's much closer to what I like.

comicshorse

2017-10-05, 11:41 AM

Just got back from seeing it
It was...........disappointing

A few immediate thoughts
I think I'm going to lay the failure of this squarely at the feet of the Director. The acting was generally good (with one glaring exception *), the script was decent, with some interesting ideas and one scene that freaked me out for no reason I can articulate yet (that's a good thing BTW)
BUT the long lingering silences, the long echoing stillness, that go on, and on, and on. I swear you could lose half-an-hour of this film just by cutting them down to a reasonable amount and boy this film does need some cutting.
Not a fan of the product placement either
Or the ending with its sudden lack of logic on behalf of the protagonist
* The exception is Jared Leto as Wallace. Its as if he saw some of the aforementioned endless silent shots and went 'Oh the tone of this movie is incredibly portenous. Well they ain't seen nothing yet !'
It is such a terrible, over done performance that it destroys any scene he's in

Eldan

2017-10-08, 11:32 AM

It's good. It's so ****ing good. It's more than good. It's one of the best movies I've seen in ages. It's everything I want in a movie. I love it.

DanyBallon

2017-10-08, 03:01 PM

comicshorse

2017-10-08, 03:11 PM

Thanks, your comments reassure me, as what you don't like, is exactly what I was expecting and looking for in a sequel to the original Blade Runner. :smallwink:

You were looking for product placement and Jared Leto horribly over acting ? :smallsmile:

Eldan

2017-10-08, 03:32 PM

For me, Leto was the only thing not great about the movie, I'll say that much. I didn't find him terrible, but yeah.

DanyBallon

2017-10-08, 03:44 PM

You were looking for product placement and Jared Leto horribly over acting ? :smallsmile:

Product placement I don't mind as it was part of the the original Blade Runner visual, if there wasn't any, it would feel odd, as for Jared Leto's performance, I'll see by myself tonight.

Otherwise, the extended silence and slow pace is what made the original a cult, so I'm looking for it in this sequel. I want to see how Villeneuve manage to create the same feel while doing it in his manner, and not just copying Ridley Scott's film

I just came out of the theater and the movie is just awesome!!!
It was way above my expectations!

Eldan

2017-10-09, 03:06 AM

DanyBallon

2017-10-09, 08:06 AM

Yeah. Thinking back, the only thing I really don't like is the soundtrack. And that mostly because it was heavy on the loud blaring noises and the theatre, as always, turned the sound up way too loud. It was physically painful a few times.

I agree, but I could say the same for most movies I see in theater nowadays :smallbiggrin:

But, for having seen both in the same day, the soundtrack of Blade Runner 2049 use a louder sound spectrum than the original.

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-09, 08:45 AM

Starbuck_II

2017-10-09, 09:50 AM

I quite enjoyed this movie, and a lot of people loved it, though its unlikely to scrape the high ceiling of the original. The visuals are obviously spectacular, and there are a lot of callbacks without feeling entirely derivative. Gosling is a perfect fit for the role.

It's a shame that it doesn't look like it'll earn it's production budget back. I wouldn't have minded a third outing.

It was good, but like the original left some questions unanswered.

We still don't know if he was a human or not.
Is the protagonist born? Was he the brother?
But hey, at least we know Harrison Ford was a Daughter.

I didn't like Wallace, he seems stupid evil to waste that replicant for no reason.
I did like the Girlfriend, even if she was fake. She even named him. But why did she rename as another hologram?

ben-zayb

2017-10-09, 10:48 AM

DanyBallon

2017-10-09, 10:52 AM

It was good, but like the original left some questions unanswered.

We still don't know if he was a human or not.
Is the protagonist born? Was he the brother?
But hey, at least we know Harrison Ford was a Daughter.

I didn't like Wallace, he seems stupid evil to waste that replicant for no reason.
I did like the Girlfriend, even if she was fake. She even named him. But why did she rename as another hologram?

From what I understood, K is a replicant. He was given Deckard's daughter memories, which as she stated was an illegal act. When she told him that his memories are real, it's because she remember them as her own, hence her tears. Though we don't understand this until the very end when the replicants rebels leader tell K that Rachael had a baby girl and not a boy like K assumed. The records K found were falsified by Deckard in order to protect his child and the others.

As for the Joi, the girlfriend, she's juste a typical mass mariet companion program that Wallace industries is selling. When I meet the hologram toward the end, he realise that when the hologram call him Joe that in fact she was just running prescripted informations in order to make him hear and see what he wanted to hear and see, hence the advertising we could see a few times in the background.

And finally for Wallace's actions, I believe they were scriptedmto show how replicants are just a products, a useful, beautyful, products, yet only a products. You get the same feel when you watch the shorts where he try to convince the authorities to let him develop a new generation of replicants.

Ranxerox

2017-10-09, 06:27 PM

Very good movie. I felt like I was in the world of the original Blade Runner from the opening moments of the first scene to the very end of the movie. Lots to think about in this movie. At what point does an AI become a person and how can you tell whether it has passed that point? Is free will the mark of having a soul or is it just an illusion for replicants, AIs, and human alike? Did Deckard do the right thing in staying away from his child? Was Lieutenant Joshi, Madame as Agent K called her, right to try to cover up the existence of the child? Why does Jared Lito seem so much like Christian Bale in this movie? Yes, lots of questions.

Two complaints though. Number one is the sound track. It was overbearing to the point of being physically uncomfortable to listen to at times. The second being that Ryan Gosling should have gotten all nekkie for this film. Really, with all the female flesh put on display throughout, it seems only fair that Ryan should have had to bare everything. Minor complaints about an overall fine film.

LordEntrails

2017-10-09, 07:01 PM

So is it any good?
Yes.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I rewatched the Director's Cut of the original the night before and still found new things to contemplate with it. 2049 will also be a movie that causes me to consider things about life not just once, but many times over.

I felt it was;
1- well done as a top tier movie
2- well done in line with the original
3- took concepts from the original and continued with them in new ways.

Well worth any sci-fi fan's time, unless they are going to prejudice them against it for reasons having little to do with the movie itself.

LordEntrails

2017-10-09, 07:07 PM

I will also add, yes, 2049 does not answer every question left open in the original. And you can even wonder about some of it's own conundrums. But that is intentional and one of the strengths of both movies.

Giggling Ghast

2017-10-09, 08:22 PM

DanyBallon

2017-10-09, 09:46 PM

I think it’s one of those movies where we’ll be dissecting the plot elements for decades.

I quite enjoyed it, though I can see why it hasn’t been box office gold. It’s slow-paced and incredibly long - not exactly the kind of movie you take a date or the kids.

Interestingly, the Blackout referenced in the film is apparently an event from an anime set in the BR universe.

Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_Black_Out_2022)

In fact, the director asked other directirs to produce three shorts that would shed light on what happen before.

One is the anime about the black out in 2022, an other is set in 2036 as feature Wallace trying to convince the authorities to allow him to produce a new germneration of obedient replicants, and the last is set one year before and show a bit more of the personality of Sapper Morton.

Those shorts are not needed prior to see and understand BR2049, but add creating more depth about the world and the different protagonist

Dienekes

2017-10-09, 10:07 PM

It was good, but like the original left some questions unanswered.

We still don't know if he was a human or not.
Is the protagonist born? Was he the brother?
But hey, at least we know Harrison Ford was a Daughter.

I didn't like Wallace, he seems stupid evil to waste that replicant for no reason.
I did like the Girlfriend, even if she was fake. She even named him. But why did she rename as another hologram?

And I doubt we ever will.
I don't think there is a "brother" they copied the boy's DNA so that the girl would not have her own on record. The boy is just some random boy.
Yeah, congrats on the girl Ford.

Eh. She was one of thousands, it's not a big loss. Not saying Wallace isn't stupid, creating a race of slaves: fine. Having the slaves reproduce when we already know that earlier they had a tendency to rebel, and are also stronger and possibly smarter than their masters? That's just dumb.

It's because the girlfriend wasn't real. Actually, I was legitimately surprised by how much I enjoyed the two together since I tend to despise shoehorned in romances in movies. Maybe I liked it because this one raised interesting questions on whether or not pre-scripted emotions are actually emotions? In any case, the hologram was designed to be the perfect wife for Joe. She can say she thought of a good name for him, but she can't think. She's not a true AI with her own personality, she's just a program giving Joe what he wants to hear. The name Joe is in her programming. He wants a supportive lover, so she becomes a supportive lover. And in that support she drives his own biases further until he is so caught up in his belief in how special he is, he lets himself be fooled into thinking he was actually born. He starts to believe he has a soul.

Or maybe, she actually did love him. Maybe that program is just as true as when it appears in biology. That's just another one of those fun discussions this movie brings up without ever answering.

Fawkes

2017-10-09, 10:17 PM

Saw it yesterday. Loved it.

This is not going to be a movie for everyone, but if you liked the original Blade Runner, this is definitely a worthy successor, and in some ways improves on the original, in my opinion.

The two things that make this sequel worthwhile: First, having our protagonist be aware he's a replicant from the start gives us a great new POV to experience this world from. Second, the romance between K and JOI worked so much more for me than the romance between Deckard and Rachel, and the added wrinkle of romance between two different levels of AI was a great way to explore the gap between AI and human.

The movie was beautifully shot, too. Everything looked amazing. They did a great job of updating the effects while still maintaining that gritty feel of Blade Runner. I loved all the throwback retrotech that looked dated by our standards but fit with the Blade Runner universe. In the same vein, I love that they included the billboards for Atari and Pan Am. Pan Am hasn't existed in the real world since 1991, but it existed in the world of the original Blade Runner, so they brought it back.

Great movie. Definite love letter to the original, and a sequel that we didn't know we needed until we had it.

Ranxerox

2017-10-09, 11:07 PM

She's not a true AI with her own personality, she's just a program giving Joe what he wants to hear. The name Joe is in her programming. He wants a supportive lover, so she becomes a supportive lover. And in that support she drives his own biases further until he is so caught up in his belief in how special he is, he lets himself be fooled into thinking he was actually born. He starts to believe he has a soul.

Or maybe, she actually did love him. Maybe that program is just as true as when it appears in biology. That's just another one of those fun discussions this movie brings up without ever answering.

I'm not sure that I agree with your assessment of Joi as not being a true AI.
She is the one that realizes that her memories can be assessed by others and used against Joe,
and that he needs to erase her from the console. There is no way that the people who programmed her could ever foreseen the circumstances that Joe found himself, so that can't have been included in her original programming. In other words, it had to be something that she thought up on her own.

IMHO, she is a true AI who could pass a Turing test with less difficulty than a lot of actual humans. She is just an AI that has to work within certain programmed parameters, such as loving and supporting her owner. She also has certain residual artifacts of her base settings such as a preference for the name Joe. However, we can all be said to have residual preference from how we were raised. Had during her time with K he done anything that would lead her to believe he would prefer a name other Joe, she would have used the other name instead. Since the matter of what name he would like never came up, she just went with her basic default data set.

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-11, 05:04 PM

Giggling Ghast

2017-10-11, 09:00 PM

Oh, the technological assumptions of the film make no sense, but they never did to begin with- robots made from steel and cogs would be easier to manufacture and maintain, and if they were flesh and blood then engineering sexual reproduction wouldn't be especially difficult, but also pointless because vat-grown models can be brought to maturity much faster (which we already know.)

I’m not sure about your assumptions here. Niander Wallace’s whole motivation for finding the natural-birth replicant is that he CAN’T make replicants as quickly or efficiently as he needs for humanity to truly expand off-world. A workforce that can reproduce on its own, however, will provide adequate amounts of labour.

Kitten Champion

2017-10-11, 09:33 PM

In the novel, androids are human-like to extremely fine detail due to... well, capitalism, and ****'s slightly misanthropic sensibilities.

The colonies are - not to dispel anyone's illusions here but - crappy places to live. You're isolated most of the time, there's a certain discomfort of living on unfamiliar lifeless soil with short dim days every day of your life, and the labour is still quite difficult -- so getting people to go out there was actually not the easiest of things despite the fact that Earth is rapidly sinking into entropy. Human-like androids who would do the heavy lifting and remove some of that isolation with their presence was their solution to some of that suicidal bleakness of colonial life. The more human-like the design the more the market value they'd have, because misery loves company, leading to ever-increasing authenticity in each successive product generation to the point that the only way to be certain the androids were synthetic was to dissect them. That, and just because they can and no one can stop them.

I don't know if that explanation fits perfectly into Blade Runner as a whole, it doesn't really matter, but I find it fits the rest of the original text quite well.

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-12, 01:44 AM

It arguably makes sense to design the pleasure models to imitate human physique and possibly human emotions, but there's no obvious reason for it in the case of replicants designed purely for combat or labour. Mechanical designs would last longer and be easier to maintain, especially in hostile space environments.

There was a slight excuse for this in the original film, insofar as we never see intelligent silicon-based life, but in 2049 Joi does perfectly well with zero organic components- which is ironic, given she's a dedicated 'pleasure model'. But in principle, steel and cogs would logically be the norm for most applications.

I’m not sure about your assumptions here. Niander Wallace’s whole motivation for finding the natural-birth replicant is that he CAN’T make replicants as quickly or efficiently as he needs for humanity to truly expand off-world. A workforce that can reproduce on its own, however, will provide adequate amounts of labour.
Yes, and my point is that this motivation doesn't make sense. We don't see replicants emerging from their culture vats as toddling infants who need to go through 10-20 years of education before they can be usefully employed- they emerge as full-fledged physical adults and get their skills and memories plugged in artificially, matrix-style. The natural-birth method of manufacturing labour is way, waaaay slower than industrial methods that scale indefinitely and have rigorous quality-control.

I mean, heck- what's stopping you from spawning replicants that build the machinery that spawn more replicants? Two-step-process-van-neumann-machines.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-12, 02:55 AM

So frraking good. Perfect pacing, a really good twist, and an ending that fulfills the movies despairing promise. 10/10.

Also that it does the plot of Her as a subplot better than Her did as the main one. Sucks on that Walkeen Phoenix!

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-12, 05:07 AM

With all that said, I think there is a different, plausible, reason why Wallace would want to hunt down any replicants engaging in unauthorised baby-making- because that would threaten his monopoly on cheap offworld labour and/or ability to control their formative environment. (It's very possible that the replicants' obedience conditioning requires having a neural jak shunted into their hindbrain during development, for example.) Whether competitors worked 'naturally' or in an underground lab with black-market equipment would be beside the point- both his profits and his quality-control would be threatened.

It does make me wonder about old man Tyrell's motives, though. Scientific curiosity? Wanting grandkids after a fashion? God complex?

ben-zayb

2017-10-12, 07:12 AM

Vogie

2017-10-12, 09:13 AM

I too really enjoyed it. I heard someone who didn't like it on the way out of the theater complain it was "a really long, really slow Ghost in the Shell wannabe" which I find amusing, because BR inspired GitS, not the other way around.

Although it is odd that both this is and Scarlett in the Shell came out the same year. And right on the heels of Westworld. It is almost certainly unplanned, but still interesting.

Back to BR 2049. It was really fantastic - the director and editors clearly loved the directors cut of the original as well, because the subtleties were ON POINT. Music was the same, pacing was the same, the cities and landscape were fantastic extrapolations. It really just zoomed out on the Blade Runner Universe.

And they also didn't do any callbacks more than needed. Just a handful of clips, Adama in the retirement home, a de-aged Sean Young (Rachel), and not a lot else. They didn't try to recreate any of the monologues, but made Dave Bautista's character would make you think of Leon from the original without being a blatant copy or redo and K's Final scene spoke about as much as Roy Batty's character. The turn in the climax

Robin Wright's character died again. That's twice this year. I haven't seen the most recent season of House of Cards, but now I'm scared to find out.

What did you all think about the often-not-subtle indicators of "racism" against Replicants? I guess it would be closer to Species-ist, but the call was certainly there. I couldn't decide if it was too blantant, too subtle, or just right. But it certainly feels like a perfect subtheme for a movie who core questions are "What is human?" and "Who am I?"

I could've even sworn that a primitive version of a self-replicating bot is already a thing that exists.

Not yet. We do have 3d printers that can print about 80-90% of another 3D Printer. As far as I know, we can't print batteries, and the requirements for a 3D printer who can print circuit boards requires different, finer pieces than a normal printer will use.

Giggling Ghast

2017-10-12, 10:26 AM

Yes, and my point is that this motivation doesn't make sense. We don't see replicants emerging from their culture vats as toddling infants who need to go through 10-20 years of education before they can be usefully employed- they emerge as full-fledged physical adults and get their skills and memories plugged in artificially, matrix-style. The natural-birth method of manufacturing labour is way, waaaay slower than industrial methods that scale indefinitely and have rigorous quality-control.

I can’t speak to the speed and efficiency of the replicant manufacturing process, but I know that something can’t grow out of nothing. The replicant body is composed of synthetic materials of some kind.

Materials have to obtained/manufactured, and while I’m not 100 per cent certain on this point, one can assume that might be the hindrance in Wallace’s manufacturing process.

What if it required, say, the work of 10 individuals to make each replicant? The workers to produce the birthsacks, to make the fluid that forms into bone and blood, to generate the false memories and then implant them.

In the novel, androids are human-like to extremely fine detail due to... well, capitalism, and ****'s slightly misanthropic sensibilities.

The colonies are - not to dispel anyone's illusions here but - crappy places to live. You're isolated most of the time, there's a certain discomfort of living on unfamiliar lifeless soil with short dim days every day of your life, and the labour is still quite difficult -- so getting people to go out there was actually not the easiest of things despite the fact that Earth is rapidly sinking into entropy. Human-like androids who would do the heavy lifting and remove some of that isolation with their presence was their solution to some of that suicidal bleakness of colonial life.

In fact, the movie suggests that life on the off world colonies is considerably better than that on Earth, which is an ecological wasteland. Numerous references are made to a ticket off-world being passage to a better life.

Chen

2017-10-12, 11:47 AM

I can’t speak to the speed and efficiency of the replicant manufacturing process, but I know that something can’t grow out of nothing. The replicant body is composed of synthetic materials of some kind.

Materials have to obtained/manufactured, and while I’m not 100 per cent certain on this point, one can assume that might be the hindrance in Wallace’s manufacturing process.

What if it required, say, the work of 10 individuals to make each replicant? The workers to produce the birthsacks, to make the fluid that forms into bone and blood, to generate the false memories and then implant them.

How would raising replicants for at least 10 years (assuming you're ok with 10 year olds doing your manual labor) as children be any faster? Over the VERY long term sure it might be faster (exponential growth and all) but that would do jack all for the initial shortage problems he's talking about.

Vogie

2017-10-12, 11:56 AM

In fact, the movie suggests that life on the off world colonies is considerably better than that on Earth, which is an ecological wasteland. Numerous references are made to a ticket off-world being passage to a better life.

It's a bit of both. The off world colonies were also where the Replicants were being sent for hard labor.

I believe the feel that they were trying to put across is that going off-world is not dissimilar to ye olde West or into nature - It's not explicitly better, but it is different. The way I felt it was being sold in the same vein as buying a small private island or mountain cabin - You can control everything, it's all yours, but there's not a lot there. You get clean air, distance between neighbors, and almost no regulators/laws/enforcement hounding you... but you won't have good (or any) internet access or utilities, repairs are really expensive, and there isn't a restaurant, grocer, or anything else around the corner. There isn't a corner. It's just you.

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-12, 12:09 PM

The obvious purpose for adding reproduction functions is the same for most living things, which is to keep the species from getting extinct. And in this case, to have it be independent from a separate production facility (ie. In the event that those would be destroyed)...
We don't really get a chance to explore Tyrell's motives in much depth, so maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but he mentions that the purpose of adding memories was to improve control over the replicants. Independent reproduction seems to defeat that purpose.

It would be like Intel releasing a microchip that also functions as a 3D-printer that makes more Intel microchips for free. How does that ever make business sense?

What if it required, say, the work of 10 individuals to make each replicant? The workers to produce the birthsacks, to make the fluid that forms into bone and blood, to generate the false memories and then implant them.
I would imagine it takes hundreds of specialised workers to build and staff the facilities required to spawn replicants, but it's not like those people evaporate after the first one crawls off the assembly line. And given replicants are 'at least equal in intelligence to the genetic designers that created them', it's not like they can't be trained to build more.

Giggling Ghast

2017-10-12, 12:26 PM

I would imagine it takes hundreds of specialised workers to build and staff the facilities required to spawn replicants, but it's not like those people evaporate after the first one crawls off the assembly line. And given replicants are 'at least equal in intelligence to the genetic designers that created them', it's not like they can't be trained to build more.

I think that would be a recipe for disaster.

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-12, 12:28 PM

I think that would be a recipe for disaster.
Sure, easily, but how is it less of a recipe for disaster when you engineer them to be capable of self-manufacture without specialised facilities of any kind?

DanyBallon

2017-10-12, 02:50 PM

We don't really get a chance to explore Tyrell's motives in much depth, so maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but he mentions that the purpose of adding memories was to improve control over the replicants. Independent reproduction seems to defeat that purpose.

In the first movie, they somehow explain that in order to get better replicant that have better interaction with humans, they must somehow feed them memories, otherwise their manufacturing process and short lifespan makes then unsuit to develop the same emotions a human acquires over it's lifespan. A born replicant would benefit from a real lifespan, thus won't need to be fed any memories at all since he will create his own as he grow up. Those replicant will be able to react the same as human do, and thus the motto "more human than human" will finally be true!

At least that was my understanding from watching both movies.

Kitten Champion

2017-10-12, 03:21 PM

In fact, the movie suggests that life on the off world colonies is considerably better than that on Earth, which is an ecological wasteland. Numerous references are made to a ticket off-world being passage to a better life.

The same is suggested in the novel, there's a certain gap between what the powerful people backing the colonial expansion want potential colonists on Earth to believe via systemized long-term messaging across the cultural sphere and what the reality actually is.

It's all matter of which layer of hell you want to decline to.

LordEntrails

2017-10-12, 04:43 PM

LordEntrails

2017-10-12, 04:48 PM

In the first movie, they somehow explain that in order to get better replicant that have better interaction with humans, they must somehow feed them memories, otherwise their manufacturing process and short lifespan makes then unsuit to develop the same emotions a human acquires over it's lifespan. A born replicant would benefit from a real lifespan, thus won't need to be fed any memories at all since he will create his own as he grow up. Those replicant will be able to react the same as human do, and thus the motto "more human than human" will finally be true!

At least that was my understanding from watching both movies.
I thought the memory implants were more for an emotional stability. And though the 4 year life span of the nexus 6 might have been a design feature (to keep old replicants from gaining independent thought biased by their slavery), there is also some evidence that it was a design flaw/consequence.

(Though I also remember something about the 4 year limit being imposed after pre-nexus 6 models rebelled.)

And that Rachel was an experiment because the life limit had been removed or bypassed and Tyrell knew she would need memories if she were to be stable long term.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-12, 05:30 PM

In the first movie, they somehow explain that in order to get better replicant that have better interaction with humans, they must somehow feed them memories, otherwise their manufacturing process and short lifespan makes then unsuit to develop the same emotions a human acquires over it's lifespan. A born replicant would benefit from a real lifespan, thus won't need to be fed any memories at all since he will create his own as he grow up. Those replicant will be able to react the same as human do, and thus the motto "more human than human" will finally be true!

At least that was my understanding from watching both movies.

It also helps to remember that the society involved has reached peak decadence. Enslaving, raping, torturing and murdering sentient life is now the norm, everything stands on a knifes edge and could collapse at any moment, and no one really cares. Making replicants more human might be nothing more than a societal tool to make natural humans feel like they are doing better than they really are, that they are on the inside of society instead of on the outside.

DanyBallon

2017-10-12, 06:01 PM

I thought the memory implants were more for an emotional stability. And though the 4 year life span of the nexus 6 might have been a design feature (to keep old replicants from gaining independent thought biased by their slavery), there is also some evidence that it was a design flaw/consequence.

(Though I also remember something about the 4 year limit being imposed after pre-nexus 6 models rebelled.)

And that Rachel was an experiment because the life limit had been removed or bypassed and Tyrell knew she would need memories if she were to be stable long term.

You are absolutely right, Nexus 6 are limited to 4 years lifespan as a safety measure. But this limitation is also why the memory implants are even more a necessity if they want to reach an emotional stability due to their shorter lifespan. See how the new generation of replicants all uses memory implants, in order to appear more human-like and be better slave? Having replicants that are born would remove the need for such memories implant, as they may be flawed. Ok, having a born replicant creating is own memories as he grow up can also lead to some other major flaws if you only look at replicants as a product.

Fawkes

2017-10-12, 08:12 PM

And that Rachel was an experiment because the life limit had been removed or bypassed and Tyrell knew she would need memories if she were to be stable long term.

IIRC, Rachel not having a life limit is only present in the original theatrical cut, and is not the case in the 'canon' Final Cut.

Vogie

2017-10-12, 08:40 PM

IIRC, Rachel not having a life limit is only present in the original theatrical cut, and is not the case in the 'canon' Final Cut.

That is correct. In the original, the neonoir narration says that the special thing about her is that she didn't have a life limit. In the Director's Cut, where all of the narration is removed, this is left ambiguous, akin to the spinning-top ending of Inception.

As he's still alive in 2049, Deckard clearly didn't have a life limit, and they implied in BR2049 that he was created to fall in love with Rachel and have children as the pinnacle of the Tyrell Corp's design.

In the director's cut, they added the Unicorn dream sequence, then Gaff leaving the origami unicorn in the final act, which implied that Deckard himself was a replicant with implanted memories.

It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that, because of this design, that neither had life limits.

ben-zayb

2017-10-12, 09:12 PM

As he's still alive in 2049, Deckard clearly didn't have a life limit, and they implied in BR2049 that he was created to fall in love with Rachel and have children as the pinnacle of the Tyrell Corp's design.

In the director's cut, they added the Unicorn dream sequence, then Gaff leaving the origami unicorn in the final act, which implied that Deckard himself was a replicant with implanted memories.

It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that, because of this design, that neither had life limits. That's assuming Wallace wasn't just playing mind games with him.

If Deckard is indeed a replicant with programmed attraction towards Rachael, does that really invalidate their "love" for each other? How about Joi's?

Lacuna Caster

2017-10-13, 04:59 AM

A born replicant would benefit from a real lifespan, thus won't need to be fed any memories at all since he will create his own as he grow up. Those replicant will be able to react the same as human do, and thus the motto "more human than human" will finally be true!

At least that was my understanding from watching both movies.
Ah... yes. "Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto." God complex it is, then.

I would have to go back to the movies or perhaps the book for canon references, but I don't think replicants are robots, androids, or synthetics. I always felt they were genetically engineered humans.
They're primarily biological constructs, yes. I suspect that the closest analogue with modern technologies would be a sort of 3D organ-printing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_printing), using cell lines that might or might not be primarily based on human DNA- though they certainly look and act similar enough to humans that using it makes sense.

It's shown that they have some distinctly superhuman abilities though, like K's ability to scan genetic data by looking at it, or Priss plunging her hand into boiling water without discomfort. (Deckard doesn't obviously have Roy's terrifying strength, which makes me wonder about whether he's human after all, though that might have been omitted to help keep his cover?)

The main point to replicants looking/acting human is to increase the audience's sympathy for an oppressed underclass, so I don't think they really explored the finer points of the manufacturing process.

Eldan

2017-10-13, 06:28 AM

I'm not sure replicants are what people think they are.

I would have to go back to the movies or perhaps the book for canon references, but I don't think replicants are robots, androids, or synthetics. I always felt they were genetically engineered humans.

Why?
1) The people who work on them are referred to as genetic engineers.
2) They bleed red.
3) It goes along with their ability to fit in and perhaps reproduce.
4) In the original, Roy was told that a life that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And that because of that the various biological attempts to make him (replicants) live longer don't work.

Yes they are grown, but we can grow plants and clone sheep today.

Now, the one "issue" with the clone thought, are the serial numbers on the organic components, like the eye and the snake scale. But, maybe those are added during incubation or have been coded to grow in the genetics themselves.

Anyone have other references either way on this?

Oh, that's entirely made clear in the book. Well, they might not be clones, as such, but they are thoroughly biological. They are detailed enough that even if you dissect them, you can't always be 100% sure. You have to either test their emotions or to dissect their central nervous system under the best microscopes.
THough they are emotionally quite a bit different in the book. More psychopathic. More brutal. Without empathy. The book makes it very clear, even from their viewpoint.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7489540-john-isidore-said-i-found-a-spider-the-three-androids

Cikomyr

2017-10-13, 09:28 PM

Oh my. That was absolutely fantastic. Loved everything about it.

People mentioned Pan Am and Atari still existing, but you noticed that the USSR also still exist in Bladeverse? XD

Also, people were seriously whining about product placement? Have you seen the original?!?!

LordEntrails

2017-10-13, 10:38 PM

Also, people were seriously whining about product placement? Have you seen the original?!?!
Gotta have something to complain about.

Kislath

2017-10-13, 10:53 PM

I'm not sure what I thought of it. It was weird. Trippy.

I didn't like all the rain. Does it ever stop raining?? It's like they showed off a bit on how well they could do rain, but then their bag of tricks ran dry, and they couldn't give us sun. Well, except in Vegas, but even then that dust blocked all the vistas.

The cops have flying cars. Okay, that's cool, but why doesn't anybody else have any kind of cars?
The giant animated hologram advertisements were cool, but there were no people around to see them. If people aren't driving in cars, and aren't walking around the streets, then where are they??

Things sure look different in only 30 years, too, don't they?

gomipile

2017-10-14, 02:35 AM

What were the bees eating? Where were the flowers? for there to be that many bees, there would have to be an awful lot of flowers within bee round trip distance of the apiaries(2 to 6 miles.)

I'm not sure about Tyrell's motives. However, perhaps Wallace wants reproducing replicants because he doesn't care about lost future profits. Maybe he sees a vastly increased replicant population as necessary for the future survival of humanity, and wants to get the credit. I think his talk about the colonies and the stars supports this a bit.

We know Wallace's corporation has other revenue streams than replicant sales. They'd probably do fine without them. And offering support for the now freely reproducing replicant labor force helping humanity spread across the cosmos could put them in a position similar to the one Google has built with its "free" products and services.

Kitten Champion

2017-10-14, 05:41 AM

What were the bees eating? Where were the flowers? for there to be that many bees, there would have to be an awful lot of flowers within bee round trip distance of the apiaries(2 to 6 miles.)

I believe the intent was to leave that as up to your imagination, to go with the theme of these miraculous specks of hope in an otherwise barren existence we've left for ourselves.

The reasonable explanation would be they're synthetic, however.

Giggling Ghast

2017-10-14, 05:27 PM

According to the director, the bees are indeed intended as a “spark of hope” - a thriving apiary in a nuclear wasteland.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/movies/denis-villeneuve-interview-blade-runner-2049.html?referer=

(In reality, we know from Chernobyl that bees have no more luck surviving in a radioactive environment than other organisms.)

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-15, 03:08 PM

Was pretty good. One question lingers though:

Do holographic AIs dream of digital goats?

It seems Wallace's economic success is built on reverse-engineered Tyrel tech. Also, it appears holographic companions by them seem to have overtaken role of physical androids on Earth.

This, in addition to his dialogue, suggests to me that they're working with Black Box tech and are having significant difficulty to provide enough supply for the demand. It'd be a major upgrade, in the long run, if they could just make their androids boink each other and throw food at the kids, rather than assemble each android in whatever way they do now.

Note: that "throw food" part is the important one. That's the real magic of biological reproduction, turning fairly simple, cheap fuel into complex structures. If they can't do that already, it implies a serious deficiency in the assembly process. Similar to how synthetic polyaramids (like Kevlar) can require finicky spinning machinery, noxious chemicals and high heats to manage, when a bunch of spiders make a comparable product by eating bugs. In real life, this is why we are putting spider genes into goats to extract silk from their milk.

RCgothic

2017-10-15, 03:53 PM

Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Reckon the bees were being fed from the hanging things - probably sugar solution dispensers.

I'm totally on the side of the replicants and JOI. As far as I'm concerned anything that passes that convincingly for sentience and sapience should be afforded equal rights with humans. JOI and K together were beautiful. Frankly if the revolution goes ahead the humans had it coming.

LordEntrails

2017-10-15, 04:35 PM

I'm not sure what I thought of it. It was weird. Trippy.
It is supposed to be.

I didn't like all the rain. Does it ever stop raining?? It's like they showed off a bit on how well they could do rain, but then their bag of tricks ran dry, and they couldn't give us sun. Well, except in Vegas, but even then that dust blocked all the vistas.
Have you seen the original? The rain is not there to show how well they can do rain, but rather to show how miserable it is to live there. That the environment has been so messed up the earth is trying to wash itself clean. The movies are about symbolism, not literalism. They make the most sense when you consider and contemplate what things might mean.

The cops have flying cars. Okay, that's cool, but why doesn't anybody else have any kind of cars?
The giant animated hologram advertisements were cool, but there were no people around to see them. If people aren't driving in cars, and aren't walking around the streets, then where are they??
Well, what might that mean? Poverty? Acid rain? Depopulation? And note that everyone can see the ads when/if they look out their windows.

Things sure look different in only 30 years, too, don't they?
Not 30 years from today, thirty years from the original, which was thirty years or so in the future from when it was released.

Eldan

2017-10-16, 02:49 AM

Yeah. It's obviously not our world. The Soviet Union is still around 2049, Vegas was nuked, they have off-world colonies, well, now, most animals and plants are extinct... it's very different.

Kitten Champion

2017-10-16, 04:30 AM

About the rain, I believe it was there to follow the motif of reflection - and in a larger sense vision - which carried over from the first Blade Runner.

There is an abundance of shots done through translucent surfaces like glass - as well as water -using various angles and methods.

Lvl 2 Expert

2017-10-16, 05:09 AM

Has anyone spotted any links yet to Soldier, the "only related by means of a single sentence stealth sequel" to the first Blade Runner?

Cikomyr

2017-10-16, 07:31 AM

Has anyone spotted any links yet to Soldier, the "only related by means of a single sentence stealth sequel" to the first Blade Runner?

Do you mean the movie where a bunch of soldiers bred and trained from birth gets replaced by genetically engineered super asian soldiers, only for the original soldier's leader to beat them at the end?

Eldan

2017-10-16, 08:09 AM

Has anyone spotted any links yet to Soldier, the "only related by means of a single sentence stealth sequel" to the first Blade Runner?

Never heard of it. Any good?

Giggling Ghast

2017-10-16, 12:42 PM

Never heard of it. Any good?

Not really, no.

Lvl 2 Expert

2017-10-16, 12:54 PM

Do you mean the movie where a bunch of soldiers bred and trained from birth gets replaced by genetically engineered super asian soldiers, only for the original soldier's leader to beat them at the end?

Yes, that one. The one with the PTSD/didn't have a youth protagonist who's closer to autistic. The one that thought it was so important that the movie was set in the really near future that their government started kidnapping babies from hospitals two years before the movie came out. By now we should have had these guys on the front for four years or so. That one is supposed to take place in the Blade Runner universe, according to the director. The link is that in one scene they use the words Tannhauser Gate (technically two scenes I guess, but the first time it's easy to miss written text).

Never heard of it. Any good?

I like to think so, yes. It's just kind of peculiar. You've got a nearly mute protagonist, constantly confused at the chaos of the real world. You've got a whole bunch of family drama, which is kind of sweet but not what you were expecting going in. You've got a military system that makes no sense in any way, whether it's numbers or the combination of weapon systems or the timeline or the officers or literally anything, and then you got Kurt Russel terminatoring the crap out of other terminators with flamethrowers and knives and guns and rockets and this really weird old timey robot looking fighting style that these completely human soldiers are for some reason trained in. But it feels good as it all comes together.

Or maybe that's just me identifying with the main character. He's off from the standard action hero, and sort of off in my direction. I have the same thing with The Transporter.

RCgothic

2017-10-18, 09:40 AM

I'm still not buying that JOI isn't fully sapient. Look how happy she was to experience that rainstorm. That had nothing to do with K. Damn her sub plot is heartbreaking.

Chen

2017-10-18, 10:13 AM

I'm still not buying that JOI isn't fully sapient. Look how happy she was to experience that rainstorm. That had nothing to do with K. Damn her sub plot is heartbreaking.

Programming your companion AI to act super happy and grateful after you buy a, presumably expensive, upgrade for them, is a pretty good marketing idea. I don't see how her reaction there is evidence of sapience.

LordEntrails

2017-10-18, 10:31 AM

Programming your companion AI to act super happy and grateful after you buy a, presumably expensive, upgrade for them, is a pretty good marketing idea. I don't see how her reaction there is evidence of sapience.
And the evidence that gift buying response was programmed? There isn't any. It's these types of open ended questions that show the power of the movies. They ask many questions, and don't provide the answers. It causes many to think, to consider, to contemplate.

What if...?

Cikomyr

2017-10-18, 11:26 AM

You can be programmed and still develop sentience.

Sentience is all about intimacy; thats the moral of the movie. While it may be replicated and recreated, it does not make it any less true. It just makes it.. peculiar.

gomipile

2017-10-18, 12:10 PM

I think it's obvious that Joi would pass a Turing test. The fact that some of her responses are based on the preprogrammed responses of a fresh-out-of-the-box Joi is equivalent to a human responding with cliché phrases they've had ingrained in them over the years. What matters in either case is what's observable and testable about their personality now, not how it got that way.

Dienekes

2017-10-18, 01:52 PM

I'm still not buying that JOI isn't fully sapient. Look how happy she was to experience that rainstorm. That had nothing to do with K. Damn her sub plot is heartbreaking.

I think it's very specifically meant to be a question without an answer.

Whether she could pass a turing test is ultimately irrelevant. She would pass or she wouldn't based upon what the director says (and I hope he never actually gives a definitive answer). The important point is the questioned raised about how people connect to things.

Vogie

2017-10-18, 02:31 PM

I think it's very specifically meant to be a question without an answer.

Precisely. The whole undercurrent of the Blade Runner series are questions such as "What is life?", "What is real?", et cetera.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-18, 03:20 PM

I think it's obvious that Joi would pass a Turing test.

We have chat bots today which can do that. Joi would actually be able to pass many much more sophisticated tests than Turing's.

Regardless of whether you think Joi is sapient, holy crap must that be one complex AI. If we take its ability to predict what K wanted to hear as general predictor of its ability to estimate human needs and desires, it is probably a better psychologist than most real ones. Nevermind its ability to adjust to the environment in almost real time. In that regard, the question of whether Joi is "sentient" is sort of dim. It obviously is sentient in the most trivial sense of being able to observe and adjust to reality, exceptionally well for a hologram.

LordEntrails

2017-10-18, 03:52 PM

Precisely. The whole undercurrent of the Blade Runner series are questions such as "What is life?", "What is real?", et cetera.
Or the biggest one of all, "What is human?"

Tvtyrant

2017-10-18, 03:57 PM

We have chat bots today which can do that. Joi would actually be able to pass many much more sophisticated tests than Turing's.

Regardless of whether you think Joi is sapient, holy crap must that be one complex AI. If we take its ability to predict what K wanted to hear as general predictor of its ability to estimate human needs and desires, it is probably a better psychologist than most real ones. Nevermind its ability to adjust to the environment in almost real time. In that regard, the question of whether Joi is "sentient" is sort of dim. It obviously is sentient in the most trivial sense of being able to observe and adjust to reality, exceptionally well for a hologram.

One of the weird questions that came up out of Joi was why the holograms aren't given any mobility? He has to carry Joi in his pocket, but they have drones with arms that could easily give Joi a body that the hologram overlays. His drone and car is for whatever reason not sentient, while Joi seems to at least meet the zombie sentience credentials.

The answer is, of course, that their society is supposed to be rather crapsack. The capacity to make fully functional androids that don't resent mankind the way the replicants do is fully within their grasp, but it wouldn't tell the story.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-18, 04:09 PM

The emanator exists precisely for the purpose of giving the hologram mobility, and could conceivably be fitted into a drone. I think the primary reason it isn't is because this is civilian tech, and implied to be crazy expensive luxury item.

Tl;dr: car for your virtual barbie is sold separately.

Also, I'm fairly sure K's car is capable of self-driving, so it has a sophisticated AI as well. And the car's drone is able to follow at least simple verbal commands, so ditto for it. They're just less antropomorphized.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-18, 04:16 PM

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-18, 04:30 PM

Tvtyrant

2017-10-18, 05:15 PM

It's not at all hard to believe a replicant could cost less than emanator. Heck, in the world today you can buy a human slave with a box of cigarettes if you know where to go.

Biggest reason being, sophisticated circuitry may need copper and rare earth metals. Both of these are in short supply today, and could be entirely used up by 2049. (That's why the kids in the orphanage are going through all that junk.)

Meanwhile, replicants are biological. A replicant's raw materials are probably dirt cheap, could even be literal dirt. The cost is likely entirely in the difficulties of manufacture and huge demand versus supply.

They have spaceships and space colonies, asteroid mining would fix all of those issues.

The reason slaves are cheap is you don't pay for their raising and education. You essentially steal the $200,000-$2,000,000 it takes to raise a child (based on location). Societies that raise slaves instead of capture them charge much, much more as a result.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-19, 12:37 AM

Asteroid mining fixes things for the space colonies. Earth is clearly not benefiting from it all that much given sweatshop labour to recycle used circuitry is a thing.

RCgothic

2017-10-19, 04:22 AM

Programming your companion AI to act super happy and grateful after you buy a, presumably expensive, upgrade for them, is a pretty good marketing idea. I don't see how her reaction there is evidence of sapience.
Can you prove to an objective observer (say someone not a human with relatable perspective on the subject) that you are self aware and not just a sophisticated biological program running on meatware? What if you had to prove it to an AI?

Sapience is something you have to take at face value. If an entity is capable of independent reasoning, telling you how it feels and responding fluently to the feelings of those it interacts with, it's pretty irrelevant whether it's truly self aware or just faking it very convincingly.

If the response to that is some form of "Don't care, you're just a machine" or "You don't matter, you're not Human", then that response is broken. It's totally devoid of any empathy.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-19, 06:46 AM

Chen is right though, in that Joi being happy for a gift is not proof of sapience. We have virtual dating simulators today which are more sophisticated than that.

A more relevant thing in that scene, as pertains to Joi's cognitive qualities, is "how does it now the gift's an emanator?"

There are some easy answers to that one. However, none of them can explain how Joi adjusts to the rain moments later.

Tyndmyr

2017-10-24, 10:00 AM

So, finally got a chance to see this, and...I'm conflicted.

I really wanted to like it, and some parts of the atmosphere were really cool, but the central story of it, just...okay, I guess it wasn't a great movie.

First off, the original had subtlety and ambiguity in parts. This movie has that potential, but always goes beyond that point to hit you in the face with something two or three times after you first realized it.

The movie Her apparently was a subplot in this movie, kind of. This was not wholly bad, but it connected to the main plot exceedingly poorly. Had it worked together, it would have been great.

Inception music blaring. This undercuts the enormity of the long shots of impressive cityscape, particularly when it's done so frequently. This probably annoyed me the most. The original movie used music well to support the mood, but the music generally is not the focus, and is not excessively loud.

I have no objection to the villain having a god complex. That's fine, and in keeping with the role. However, he did dial it to 11, and it became wildly overacted and tiresome. A strangely large amount of time devoted to depicted the clear villain as more villainous. This happens to some degree with the secondary villain as well. Look, after they off the FIRST innocent on a whim, the audience knows they're the bad guy, check. We don't need to repeat every five minutes for hours.

Flower/bees focus made no sense in context. Yes, I get the metaphorical connection between a flower and bees. That's obvious. But from an in-world perspective, there is no reason for either to be there, and despite the film focusing in on both, this never actually matters to the plot. Compare to the theme of eyes in the original, and it comes up distinctly inferior.

Theme-wise, the aesthetics are great, but they are more sci-fi, and less noir. This wasn't really a bad thing, but it does diverge somewhat from the original world, and the story takes on a slightly different tone as a result. As a specific example, the use of the orange/blue color contrast was a thing that the original didn't embrace, but this used heavily, as have many other sci-fi films.

The end twist was obvious from the moment she said "that's illegal". She didn't say impossible, or even difficult, merely illegal. It is already clear by this point that illegal activity is pretty commonplace.

I was unconcerned by the advertising or precipitation that some said they disliked. Those are both pretty much spot on with the original, and part of the atmosphere/world.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-24, 02:17 PM

Sapience is something you have to take at face value. If an entity is capable of independent reasoning, telling you how it feels and responding fluently to the feelings of those it interacts with, it's pretty irrelevant whether it's truly self aware or just faking it very convincingly.

If the response to that is some form of "Don't care, you're just a machine" or "You don't matter, you're not Human", then that response is broken. It's totally devoid of any empathy.

So if something fakes sapience in order to infiltrate or undermine society, the only response to the sapience zombie is to accept it unthinkingly?

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-24, 02:47 PM

It is categorically impossible for a being to fake sapience to the degree required to infiltrate and undermine society, without ticking all the boxes we'd use to check if it is sapient.

Try again.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-24, 04:06 PM

It is categorically impossible for a being to fake sapience to the degree required to infiltrate and undermine society, without ticking all the boxes we'd use to check if it is sapient.

Try again.

Based on what categories?

What examples do we have?

If McDonalds made a McLover that is designed to subtly undermine your self-confidence to get you to buy their food and sold it to the public at large it would be both invasive and meet your checkmarks.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-24, 04:17 PM

See, you subtly already moved the goalpost. "Something faking sapience" is different from a third (and unquestionably sapient) party trying to make something pass for sapient.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-24, 04:51 PM

See, you subtly already moved the goalpost. "Something faking sapience" is different from a third (and unquestionably sapient) party trying to make something pass for sapient.

Nope, you are strawmanning me and ignoring the context of the discussion. We are literally discussing whether a designed and supposedly sentient AI needs to be accepted at face value when it responds pleasurably to you paying its corporation more money. Try again.

Dienekes

2017-10-24, 04:55 PM

It is categorically impossible for a being to fake sapience to the degree required to infiltrate and undermine society, without ticking all the boxes we'd use to check if it is sapient.

Try again.

As someone who’s just casually watching this conversation. Wouldn’t this be the kind of blanket statement one would need some kind of logical proof to provide support for the assertion?

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-24, 05:16 PM

Nope, you are strawmanning me and ignoring the context of the discussion. We are literally discussing whether a designed and supposedly sentient AI needs to be accepted at face value when it responds pleasurably to you paying its corporation more money. Try again.
And if you'd bothered to scroll back three posts, you'd noticed I'm well aware of the context and agree that Joi being happy at a gift is poor proof of anything.

What I'm underlining here is your use of "to fake". The act of faking requires motivation. So who has the motivation? In your McLover example, it's the corporation, so we need not assume any on the part of McLover. Hence, we can via parsimony conclude that McLover has none.

But if McLover itself has the motivation, things get quite different. Because in order to have motivation to fake, a thing needs comprehension of what is the reality of the subject being faked. Add to this, you specified it must be good enough at faking to be able to infiltrate and undermine. So now it also needs tools to fake convincingly.

Now enumarate, either in your mind or here in writing, the necessary elements of "sapience" which need to be known to fake it, and then list the tools required to do it. Then tell me how you are supposed to distinquish such a fake from a real sapient.

Tvtyrant

2017-10-24, 06:54 PM

And if you'd bothered to scroll back three posts, you'd noticed I'm well aware of the context and agree that Joi being happy at a gift is poor proof of anything.

What I'm underlining here is your use of "to fake". The act of faking requires motivation. So who has the motivation? In your McLover example, it's the corporation, so we need not assume any on the part of McLover. Hence, we can via parsimony conclude that McLover has none.

But if McLover itself has the motivation, things get quite different. Because in order to have motivation to fake, a thing needs comprehension of what is the reality of the subject being faked. Add to this, you specified it must be good enough at faking to be able to infiltrate and undermine. So now it also needs tools to fake convincingly.

Now enumarate, either in your mind or here in writing, the necessary elements of "sapience" which need to be known to fake it, and then list the tools required to do it. Then tell me how you are supposed to distinquish such a fake from a real sapient.

You don't need to know a list of requirements to meet them. A spider that looks like a flower has no idea how it ended up that way, or any idea what an idea is.

It is not hard to imagine a parasite that looks like a person and imitates random snatches of conversation without knowing what they mean. Chat bots and parrots both do it after all.

A list for sapience we can use would be compassion, insight, and understanding (going off the common definition of sapience). Another could be simply "human like."

So anything with acess to a large number of human texts could imitate the former by digging through keywords for statements on it, and the latter definition by simple behavioral imitation not much more advanced than a parrot with an encyclopedia.

As for what pressures could lead to such an organism forming, anything from an animal that happens to look human like and we kill the ones that can't pass to computer programs can lead to such a thing.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-25, 06:11 AM

You don't need to know a list of requirements to meet them. A spider that looks like a flower has no idea how it ended up that way, or any idea what an idea is.

But coincidentally looking like a flower is not analogous to mimicking sapience. Even within concept of camouflage mimicry, there is a better parallel: octopi which actively change their coloration to fit with environment.

Notably, they can do this with man-made objects. Equally notably, we know the octopi only see limited portion of visible light, so we don't actually know how the octopi recognize and mimic some of the patterns they can. You might not agree such octopi are sapient, but they are undeniably living, sentient, intelligent things. They have motivation, where as the spider that coincidentally looks like a flower does not, and this reflects in complexity in thought and behaviour throughout.

It is not hard to imagine a parasite that looks like a person and imitates random snatches of conversation without knowing whäat they mean. Chat bots and parrots both do it after all.

There's a big difference between ability to repeat random sounds and ability to fake. Your comparison points are also entirely unlike in a way that highlights the difference.

A parrot which learns to mimic a human does not do that with the motivation to fake. Neither does the process which gave it the ability to do so. The parrot is generalizing an unrelated ability to do so. An intelligent parrot will then use this ability to communicate information to other parrots, and to humans, to further its own motivations, such as acquiring food.

Chatbots don't do that. They can't do that. The human with the motivation to fake purpose-built them for that and they can't use that ability for anything else.

That's the difference of a living, sentient, intelligent being, and a chat AI. The latter's ability to fool more humans is superficial. The two comparison points are actually worlds apart, operating on entirely different principles. A parasite close to a parrot would tickle the line of sapience, because the wisest parrots already do themselves.

A list for sapience we can use would be compassion, insight, and understanding (going off the common definition of sapience). Another could be simply "human like."

So anything with acess to a large number of human texts could imitate the former by digging through keywords for statements on it, and the latter definition by simple behavioral imitation not much more advanced than a parrot with an encyclopedia.

Wrong.

The fact that you once again jump from describing how a chat AI does things ("access to human texts..." etc.) to a parrot shows that you're fundamentally confused about how we could implement something that could fake sapience.

Again: a parrot can mimic humans only because it is already a sentient, intelligent, living organism. What is the way that would allow a parrot to massively increase its vocabulary, without making it cross to sapience?

Hint: it would not bear any resemblance to how chat AIs increase in vocabulary.

As for what pressures could lead to such an organism forming, anything from an animal that happens to look human like and we kill the ones that can't pass to computer programs can lead to such a thing.

This is a non-argument, since we know evolution can lead to both sentience and sapience. How the organism is formed is not important.

Cikomyr

2017-10-25, 07:31 AM

I suppose you could draw the line between sapience and simulated responses aping sapience at the degree of agency the software is able to demonstrate.

Accepting its own potential mortality and be willing to endanger itself for the benefit of its owner might qualify as being more than preprogrammed responses.

At one point of sophistication, I think you have to accept sapience, or "good enough sapience".

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-25, 10:50 AM

As with the emanator, it's not what Joi is doing in that scene that's the relevant question, it is how.

How does it know its owner is in danger? How does it know it itself is in danger? These are pretty abstract problems and Joi is not demonstrated to have easy solutions to them.

The car crash. The "easy" solution would be for K's car to have an AI of its own that's monitoring his vitals and condition of his car, and for the car to communicate those to Joi's emanator via radio link. That way you bypass most hard things Joi would have to do to figure out what's happening. But while this is eminently plausible, it's not confirmed anywhere that this is what's happening.

Chen

2017-10-25, 11:16 AM

Tyndmyr

2017-10-25, 12:06 PM

As someone who’s just casually watching this conversation. Wouldn’t this be the kind of blanket statement one would need some kind of logical proof to provide support for the assertion?

I agree! This seems like a really big statement. I mean, we have chatbots now that can fool people into believing they are speaking with humans, at least for a time. They're not great, and they're definitely not sapient, but they can fool to some degree. I have little trouble envisioning a future in which they are improved, and can fool people longer and more consistently, but are still definitely far short of sapience.

I mean, the whole point of the turing test is fooling people into believing they're human, right?

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-25, 03:29 PM

For the level of computing necessary to produce that level AI anyways, it wouldn't be too hard to add some sort of simple libraries for recognizing injury/danger and incorporate them anyways. Would be a good selling point. Could advertise it as an extra medic-alert feature that comes with your AI pleasure servant.

This is just as wrong as talking about how something is "as advanced as a parrot".

To wit: the level of computing required to achieve an outcome varies by algorithm, and for most tasks there are multiple different algorithms with different computational needs. The corollary to this is that there is no straightforward way to link "level of computation" to "level of AI". And because of that, the argument that "it wouldn't be too hard to add some simple libraries" is a complete non-sequitur. You cannot even begin to answer the question of how hard it would be before specifying the algorithm, that is, explaing how the AI does what it does.

---

I agree! This seems like a really big statement. I mean, we have chatbots now that can fool people into believing they are speaking with humans, at least for a time. They're not great, and they're definitely not sapient, but they can fool to some degree. I have little trouble envisioning a future in which they are improved, and can fool people longer and more consistently, but are still definitely far short of sapience.

I mean, the whole point of the turing test is fooling people into believing they're human, right?

The point of the Turing test was the hypothetical that if a machine is capable of holding discussion in a natural language so well that a human doesn't recognize it as a a machine, then maybe it can think.

This has since been proven false: even the chatbots that can pass the Turing test are really dumb even compared to other types of contemporary AI.

The issue here is, again, that you're looking at what the chatbots did, but not how.

Speaking was not involved. It's text-only medium. No chat AI has gotten even close to passing Turing test audially or audio-visually, because the type of AI used for text-only Turing test is completely useless for those variations of the test. It's the same issue as with comparing a chat AI to parrot. The two function nothing alike. You cannot get one from the other no matter how big a database you try to plug in.

The point here is that if you're envisioning something like Joi based on ELIZA, you're committing an error of thought. The former is not "more advanced" form of the latter, it'd require entirely different type of technology and AI. The same is true between McDonalds designing McLover to fool you, and McLover itself fooling you, as I priorly tried to explain.

Tyndmyr

2017-10-25, 05:03 PM

I am aware of exactly how limited chatbots are at present. However, a range of realism exists even within chatbots. Adding non verbal communication and what not isn't

I mean, a chinese room that runs offa code isn't sentient, now is it?

The idea that you can't fake sentience without BEING sentient just seems wrong. It's not true for literally anything else that is faked, is it? And how hard it is to fake something can depend strongly on situation, the person being deceived, and so forth.

Those dumb chatbots DO fool some people into believing they are human, at least for a while. Despite all of their harsh limitations. Why couldn't a greatly advanced bot do something similar?

Edit: It doesn't matter if it's a straight lookup table, or if you're using backpropogation or what have you. Nothing we have now would be considered sentient by any reasonable person, regardless of tech.

LordEntrails

2017-10-25, 09:13 PM

First, I think we want to be discussing the term sentience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience), and not sapience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom#Sapience). From my inexpert view, and a little googling, they are not synonymous.

Next I would get back to what someone said earlier; if something is indistinguishable from the original, does it matter? If you have two painting that are identical and can not empirically be told apart, does it matter if one was painted by Andy Warhol and the other by me? Well, if you have papers or similar saying that one is the Warhol painting people will pay more than the one painted by me. There is subjective value there.

Now, what if I have two oranges that are empirically identical. But one was grown on a tree and one made in device like a replicator. Again, most people would value the tree grown one more than the other. I would say that this is because we place value on things we think are more valuable, that are "natural" or "expected". Now, should one be more valuable than the other? Why?

Now take two living creatures. If they are empirically identical (which is not the case in BladeRunner), is one more valuable than the other? Carry this into sentience and/or "humanity".

If you poke something with a pin and it reacts as if pained, it bleeds, and it is adverse to the experience. Is it less if that is a response that is created/programed response by another creature or if those same responses are due to biological/evolution?

Fawkes

2017-10-25, 09:57 PM

If you poke something with a pin and it reacts as if pained, it bleeds, and it is adverse to the experience.

Hath not a Replicant eyes? Hath not a Replicant hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a human is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

gomipile

2017-10-25, 11:57 PM

The idea that you can't fake sentience without BEING sentient just seems wrong.

The idea is that for definitions of sentience and sapience to be useful, they have to be based on testable qualities.

So, given a useful definition of sentience, we can devise a sentience test which can determine sentience. Realistically, the test will probably have a statistical confidence proportional to the amount of data you feed it about a subject being tested. In practical terms, the longer the test goes on, the more confidence we can have that the results are correct according to our definition.

Once you have a theoretical definition of and a practical test for sentience, the working definition of sentience for most people becomes "passes the sentience test."

Vogie

2017-10-26, 07:51 AM

Those dumb chatbots DO fool some people into believing they are human, at least for a while. Despite all of their harsh limitations. Why couldn't a greatly advanced bot do something similar?

The chatbots that have fooled people into thinking they're human have also played with what a presenters thought was human as well. For example, the chatbot "Eugene Goostman" that passed the test in 2014 was modeled to present as a 13 year old boy who had English as a second language. The next one, IIRC, was modeled to present as a 17 year old Chinese girl, also with English as a second language.

HAL 9000, they are not. The reason they're using these is by lowering the bar by manipulating the variations on a theme of "human". Also note, that these are just text chatbots... a joi-style bot likely couldn't pass as more than a 4 or 5 year old at this point.

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-26, 09:04 AM

It looks like I was ninja'd by a bunch of other posters, but for clarity, here goes again:

I am aware of exactly how limited chatbots are at present. However, a range of realism exists even within chatbots. Adding non verbal communication and what not isn't

I mean, a chinese room that runs offa code isn't sentient, now is it?

The idea that you can't fake sentience without BEING sentient just seems wrong. It's not true for literally anything else that is faked, is it? And how hard it is to fake something can depend strongly on situation, the person being deceived, and so forth.

Those dumb chatbots DO fool some people into believing they are human, at least for a while. Despite all of their harsh limitations. Why couldn't a greatly advanced bot do something similar?

Edit: It doesn't matter if it's a straight lookup table, or if you're using backpropogation or what have you. Nothing we have now would be considered sentient by any reasonable person, regardless of tech

I can grok it's an unintuitive idea that something can't fake sentience, without being sentient. But before we go further down that line, let's return back a few posts to what I said, because there are actually two different lines of discussion going on here.

It is categorically impossible for a being to fake sapience to the degree required to infiltrate and undermine society, without ticking all the boxes we'd use to check if it is sapient.

Try again.

You (and TvTyrant) have chosen to interprete this as "something can't fake sentience without being sentient", and then tried to point out that we already have programs that can fool some humans. But when you look at my post, you'll see that that's not the problem. The problem is that once you invoke Chinese Room and Philosophical Zombies, you've made the concept of sapience unfalsifiable. Once you can't distinquish machine from a human, you also can't distinquish human from a machine, so either you have to categorically accept or categorically doubt all claims of sapience, or you have to admit that the way you label things sapient is completely arbitrary.

This what other posters have also pointed out. The important thing here is that by proving people easier to fool, you're not actually making a stronger case for "Joi is not sapient". You're making a stronger case for "people would not be able to tell if Joi is sapient, and would hence either accept or reject it at face value."

So that's the first discussion.

The second discussion is about what traits of future tech you can extrapolate from modern tech. This is the discussion where distinquishing a "McLover" from a robot that can itself fake a thing, or distinquishing a chatbot from a parrot, becomes relevant.

What I've done, or tried to do, is show that neither chatbots nor parrots fit the description of "being that can fake sapience to the degree required to infiltrate and undermine society", for various reasons, and that such a being would be unlike either. So trying to extrapolate traits of such a being from modern chatbots or parrots is invalid, just like trying to extrapolate traits of a parrot from a chatbot is invalid.

Or in other words: if you have a "greatly advanced bot" that's not, and could not, be based on the technology of chatbot, you can't make decision of whether the "greatly advanced bot" is sapient based on the chatbot. It's plain and simple not a valid criterion for judging.

Tyndmyr

2017-10-26, 10:10 AM

The chatbots that have fooled people into thinking they're human have also played with what a presenters thought was human as well. For example, the chatbot "Eugene Goostman" that passed the test in 2014 was modeled to present as a 13 year old boy who had English as a second language. The next one, IIRC, was modeled to present as a 17 year old Chinese girl, also with English as a second language.

HAL 9000, they are not. The reason they're using these is by lowering the bar by manipulating the variations on a theme of "human". Also note, that these are just text chatbots... a joi-style bot likely couldn't pass as more than a 4 or 5 year old at this point.

Absolutely. What "passes as human" depends on the context. Alter the context, you alter the difficulty. After all, none of us would say that someone speaking a second language was NOT human, but we would have lowered expectations of ability to communicate.

One fun thing to examine in turing tests are the errors. Not the incorrect identification of the bots...but of the humans. A certain rate of humans are often misidentified as bots. This already happens a fair amount of the time.

Now, at our current level of bots, which, as you say, is pretty awful, we can still usually tell bots from humans. Given a significant amount of time to get a good sample set, of course. But...not always. We're reasonably bad at grokking coded intelligence *now*, when it is still easy, because it's not a trait we evolved for. As improvements happen, it will become more so.

Now, Frozen, ultimately, the humanity of Joi is determined primarily by what she says, yes? We are under no illusions that she is physically human. The question is merely if she appears to be truly human to him. And, she does. At least until he takes the time to interact with another copy and realizes that they're acting similarly. As portrayed, she's reasonably able to act as a surrogate for a person to an individual. It's only when you look at the broader context and see all the copies acting similarly that the ruse is apparent. What's unrealistic about that?

And, as for "hiding within society", that's...pretty easy. We're more and more online these days, there are increasingly few interactions which *must* happen in person. Plenty of people have online friends they have literally never met, despite knowing them for years. This trend will probably continue, and it'll be increasingly easy to fake personas, or, given advancements in AI, entire lives.

Ranxerox

2017-10-26, 11:17 AM

ultimately, the humanity of Joi is determined primarily by what she says, yes?

Well, no.

It is Joi's idea that K erase her from the apartment console and break off the antenna of the emanatory. Why would someone programming a companion simulator include something like that it's canned responses no matter how sophisticated simulation?

Tyndmyr

2017-10-26, 12:36 PM

Frozen_Feet

2017-10-26, 01:52 PM

Now, Frozen, ultimately, the humanity of Joi is determined primarily by what she says, yes? We are under no illusions that she is physically human. The question is merely if she appears to be truly human to him. And, she does. At least until he takes the time to interact with another copy and realizes that they're acting similarly. As portrayed, she's reasonably able to act as a surrogate for a person to an individual. It's only when you look at the broader context and see all the copies acting similarly that the ruse is apparent. What's unrealistic about that?

"Unrealistic" is the wrong word. The problem here is that what the giant purple Joi says is within realm of what an actual human might say in the same situation, so thinking it as confirmation that all Jois are the same is too low of a bar to pass. It's enough to create ambiguity, but not confirm it either way.

As to the "hiding in society" thing, there are currently dead easy ways to stop malware chatbots (etc.) which rely on the inability of an AI to generalize. A standard IQ test array stops such programs cold, and this is the basis for majority of "anti-bot" questions ("What numbers do you see in this image?") you see on the net these days. Humans who are fooled by such programs, remain fooled because they don't know about differences such as this, so they never think to test for them.

EDIT: Scratch the above, I thought of a better way to explain what I was after.

Your question has in it the assumption that if two Jois act alike, then that means neither Joi is sapient. But this is not given. Contrast with the situation in the original Blade Runner: we know Rachel is a replicant and can be confirmed as such by VK test. Does this also mean that Rachel is not sapient?

For the purposes of the scene were talking about, we could replace holographic Jois with two actual, human hookers, one of which was hired by Wallace to keep tabs on K and tell him everything he wants to hear. That's... basically how it goes in plenty of other Noir movies, so shouldn't be hard to imagine. So in the end, K finds out that his precious girlfriend was a hooker and acting just like expected from a hooker hired to do that job. But does that tell anything about her sapience? Does it even confirm she was faking everything?

RCgothic

2017-10-26, 04:13 PM

Sapience zombies aren't falsifiable. There's no way to prove an entity that passes any conceivable test of sapience isn't just a convincing fake. Humans can't pass a bar that high.

And defending ourselves against such hypothetical threats leads humanity down some very dark paths. Even a p-zombie will apparently resent its treatment.

Wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Better to just treat anything with the appearance of sapience as being sapient. And if we do all end up being replaced by p-zombies, so what? The universe will not be measurably different.

As for JOI, she's evidently emotionally and rationally aware. That there are others like her doesn't change anything. It's like twins raised separately on identical cultural curriculums. They're going to come out of it with some similar predispositions. But arguing that means they aren't each self aware because they fail at some unrelated uniqueness quotient is a non sequitur.

Note that we're not even having this discussion about Luv, K, Roy or Rachel. Self awareness is not a property restricted to humanoids. There's no reason 0s and 1s shouldn't be as capable in that regard as ACGTs.

LordEntrails

2017-10-26, 04:45 PM

Well, no.

It is Joi's idea that K erase her from the apartment console and break off the antenna of the emanatory. Why would someone programming a companion simulator include something like that it's canned responses no matter how sophisticated simulation?
Is it hard to imagine a program that is programmed to delete itself under certain circumstances? Of course not, virus' do that today. The will to end one's own existence it not a clue about sentience. We know of humans that have been willing to give their own lives for various reasons.

I think the movie(s) intentionally don't give us enough information to judge unequivocally if Joi (Rachel, etc) are sentient or human. I see the value in asking and discussing the possibilities are simply to discuss the bigger questions, "What is sentience?" and "What does it mean to be human?"