Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy: This Breaks the World

(Paperback)

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Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 sequel to the 1982 movie Blade Runner, about a world in which some human-looking replicants have become dangerous, so that other human-looking replicants, as well as humans, have the job of hunting down the dangerous models and "retiring" (destroying) them. Both films have been widely hailed as among the greatest science-fiction movies of all time, and Ridley Scott, director of the original Blade Runner, has announced that there will be a third movie.

Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy is a collection of entertaining articles on both Blade Runner movies (and on the spin-off short films and novels) by twenty philosophers representing diverse backgrounds and philosophical perspectives. Among the issues addressed in the book:

• What does Blade Runner 2049 tell us about the interactions of state power and corporate power
• Can machines ever become truly conscious, or will they always lack some essential human qualities
• The most popular theory of personhood says that a person is defined by their memories, so what happens when memories can be manufactured and inserted at will
• Do AI-endowed human-looking replicants have civil and political rights, or can they be destroyed whenever "real" humans decide they are inconvenient
• What are the social and psychological implications of human-AI sexual relations