The human as a machine

For my New Communication Technologies class, we were asked to watch the classic movie Bladerunner, based off of the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick. It is a 1980's sci-fi thriller depicting Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically engineered robots called replicants--visually indistinguishable from adult humans--are manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation, whose slogan is "More Human Than Human". These replicants are only used on off-world colonies and are banned from Earth. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are then hunted down by "Bladerunners". A central theme of Bladerunner is delving into our psychological enthrallment with power over others. Society views these replicants as nothing more than a machine, therefore making it easy for society to treat the replicants immorally. To humans, replicants have no souls. It then becomes a theme of the replicants becoming self-aware and doing a little "soul-searching" (pun intended). This theme becomes more apparent with the film's obsession with eyes. You know the common phrase, the eyes are the windows to the soul. In this movie, the eyes are used as a metaphor to reference the condition of one's soul. The Bladerunner Holden's eyes were very damaged, giving insight into his soul. Many killing/death scenes in the movie also involve eyes, such as when Roy Batty puts an end to Tyrell by pushing in his eyes. I found the movie very eye-opening (can't help the puns). It ties together the discussions we have been having in class about the possibility of biochips being put in our brains, and the implications of this.

We also discussed cybernetics, which is the study of communication, command and control in living organisms. Cybernetics is a science that proposed a completely new vision of the human body, and its relationship with the environment and machines. Norbert Wiener, a founding figure of the science of cybernetics provides a useful overview of different phases in machine-based history of the western body. These stages are a mythic Golemic age, the age of clocks (17th and 18th centuries), the age of steam (late 18th and 19th centuries) and lastly the age of communication and control--marking the shift from power engineering to communications engineering (Wiener, 1948). Wiener noted that these stages generated four models of the human body: the body as a malleable, magical, clay figure, the body as a clock mechanism, the body as a heat engine, and the body as an electronic system (Wiener, 1948). I thought it was interesting to think of the body in this way--to think in a way that technology is changing so quickly but we as humans are adapting to it just as quickly--how far can we go?


Wiener, Norbort, 1948, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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