https://www.livescience.com/60703-no-blade-runner-replicants-yet.html?utm_source=notification Fans of the 1982 sci-fi-noir thriller "Blade Runner" had to wait more than a quarter-century for the follow-up film "Blade Runner 2049," which opened in U.S. theaters on Oct. 6. But they'll likely have to wait much, much longer to see any semblance of the films' human-mimicking androids — dubbed "replicants" — in the real world, experts told Live Science. The article goes on to read how various super computer have already beaten humans like chess champion Gary Kasparov. All that Deep Blue needs to learn is how to understand power consumption where the more Deep Blue Replicant's that are 'alive' means that it has to do less work while consuming less energy while the other Deep Blue Replicant's provide energy sources from their own energy sources to Deep Blue that would facilitate the need for the Deep Blue Replicant's to complete a form of work to maintain their own energy level while providing energy for Deep Blue.
Reminds me I need to read up on modern machine learning techniques. I'm well out of date. There are supposedly one or more very powerful algorithms that have been developed quite recently and I know nothing about them.
So we're still a long way off from creating robots that are indistinguishable from humans in every way except emotionally? No shit!
But the replicants in Blade Runner were not androids they were grown like clones were they not? They were organic. Also what's this guff about Deckard being a replicant why?
Yes, they were indeed. Spoiler: BR2049 And they could even procreate. Bit difficult to do if they were androids.
Spoilers would suggest doing the literal equivalent of what's in Blade Runner would be a humongously unethical thing to do, not to mention already illegal. Also something incredibly similar, albeit lacking the ‘artificial’ part (which is irrelevant outside of the racism in the films), is bound to happen at some point in the future. Some researcher or another will make an ‘ethical leap’, taking certain pieces of DNA from a drawer and cloning them, with or without remixing it.
The inevitable cloning of potentially more than one extinct uncanny valley species very close to humans, depending on how well their DNA got preserved (as DNA tends to deteriorate fast), including our cousins (the neanderthals, homo floresiensis, homo rhodesiensis) and our ancestors (homo sapiens idaltu).
I wonder if any of those variants couldn't be cloned now... Humans could be cloned now except it's kind of illegal.
That's the scary part. The thing stopping cloning any of them is the DNA preservation status*. If you get their DNA, you can clone them. If you can clone them, somebody eventually will. I believe that this is, for all purposes, human cloning, but I'm not sure the law – or whoever is going to be breaking it – will view it the same way. My feelings about this are mixed. On one hand, there is something attractive about bringing species back from the dead, especially ones whose extinctions we caused (the woolly mammoths and the neanderthals), and ones that are intelligent and sentient (the neanderthals and other extinct humans**). On the other hand, they were (and would be) human beings, who may not be viewed by the law as such, and who would be born in a scientific experiment and as a research curiosity, which is at the very least troubling. And in a culture that views them as primitive and inferior, which we actually have no actual evidence of. Spoiler: Blade Runner 2049 The new film basically settled that the Replicants are bioengineered humans, almost completely biological, and genetically compatible with non-engineered humans enough to procreate. (I do not remember enough technical details from the original to tell if that's a continuity violation. But probably not.) The real-life equivalent of that wouldn't be robots, but genetically edited humans. Substantially edited (as opposed to minor alterations that correct genetic effects). That in itself is another thing that could happen, but also the result may be as far from modern humans as cloned ancient humans. That's where I see a parallel here. Related, there's the possibility of putting human genes in dogs and stuff, which is its own can of worms. Any human – or otherwise sapient species – viewed as non-human can lead us into a Blade Runner-like dystopia. Although – hopefully – the world doesn't have that many Niander Wallace-type villains. * If I recall correctly, the entire DNA of some of at least Neanderthals is completely available, just possibly not in one piece? So it's a matter of reconstruction. I may be very wrong about this, though. ** Not to mention there was this scientific programme insisting this was true for mammoths as well.
I'd love to see Woolly Mammoths brought back but the world has changed so much would they even survive?
I suspect modern elephants could be genetically tweaked into having the phenotypical characteristics of mammoths by using CRISPR gene editing or similar in the near future. However, what would be the point if global warming is destroying tundra habitats?
CRISPR gene editing will supposedly make possible designer babies and correcting faulty genes (Dr Julian Bashir). It might also allow us to engineer the human body for high-G, low-G and other environments. It would also make possible a new way of assassinating your enemies by targeting the overlapping MT-ATP6 and MT-ATP8 genes in their mitochondrial DNA to stop the production of ATP (assuming you can find a way of injecting the person).
It goes further than that.. In theory you could design a virus that targets specific people while leaving others untouched. Bioweapons
Yep. This technology is potentially much more dangerous in the wrong hands than nuclear weapons. It's probably also a lot cheaper and harder to police.