Yes, Androids Do Dream of Electric Sheep

Peter Jukes explores how the hallucinations of AI reveal that machines can never match the power of the human unconscious

In Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner – set in a dystopian 2019 – artificial intelligence and bioengineering have advanced to such an extent that the only way to detect an artificial replicant is the emotional triggers contained in the ‘Voight-Kampff’ test – because androids don’t experience feelings like humans.

Flash forward to real life, seven years after Blade Runner was supposed to have happened, and the most effective killer robots today could never be mistaken for human. The majority are quadcopters, currently killing tens of thousands of people a month in Ukraine (and, in some cases, rescuing the injured and resupplying front lines) or destroying Russia’s air defences and oil refining capacity.

As for interaction or communication, the closest thing we have to Ridley Scott’s replicants are the large language models pioneered by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are predicted to cut their own deadly Blade Runner-like swathe through the ranks of white-collar jobs.