Blade Runner

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
by Adrienne Mayor
Published 27 Nov 2018

Further, through myths like that of Talos, ancients could contemplate whether an entity “made, not born” was simply a mindless machine or an autonomous, sentient intelligence. In the Talos myth, the sorceress Medea perceived the issues that have become themes in science fiction from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) to Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014). The Talos myth was an early exploration of the idea that automata might come to desire to be real humans. As we saw, Medea intuited that, like a mortal being, Talos might fear his own death and long for immortality.

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Huxley and William James in the 1800s, and Gnostic concepts are powerfully revived by philosopher John Gray in Soul of a Marionette (2015) and novelist Philip Pullman in the epic trilogy His Dark Materials (1995–2000). The Blade Runner films (1982, 2017) are another example of how science-fiction narratives play on the paranoid suspicion that our world is already full of androids—and that it would be impossible to apply a Turing test to oneself to prove that one is not an android.34 One of the replicants in Blade Runner repeats, “I think, therefore I am,” the famous conclusion by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes was quite familiar with mechanical automata of his era powered by gears and springs, and he embraced the idea that the body is a machine.

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Kang (2005) points out the misogynistic impulse in Pygmalion’s creation of a perfect woman and compares modern narratives of female sex robots, which, unlike the ancient myth, have unhappy endings. 8. Marshall (2017) compares the female replicants of the Blade Runner films to Pygmalion’s creation. 9. Some interpret Apollodorus Library 3.14.3 to suggest that a son, Paphos, and a daughter, Metharme, were born to Pygmalion’s living statue. Similarly, the plot of Blade Runner 2049 turns on the magical existence of two children, a girl and a boy who is an exact copy, born to the replicant Rachael, who died in childbirth. See chapter 8 for a Roman-era fantasy about the offspring of the ancient replicant female Pandora. 10.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Terminator had Cyberdyne Systems, Robocop had Omni Consumer Products, and Blade Runner had the Tyrel corporation. As Ford's character goes about his grisly job of killing replicants in the movie, you can see ads for RCA, Bell Telephone, Coca-Cola, Atari, TsingTao, and Koss Corp. among others. Many of the companies that appeared in the movie disappeared not long after it came out. Many either went bankrupt or were wiped out by competition after being featured in the film. Appearing in Blade Runner turned out to be a harbinger of oblivion. Critics even began to refer to “The Commercial Curse of Blade Runner.”17 The companies Scott depicted were completely dominant, and some were even monopolies.

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TsingTao beer is still the most popular beer in China. In the recent sequel Blade Runner 2049 many corporations paid for ad placements: Johnnie Walker whisky, Sony, Peugeot, and Coca-Cola.18 Time will tell which brands will survive. What is certain is that there is no Blade Runner curse. The film shows that even though corporations make wonderful movie villains, they are often completely impotent when it comes to simply surviving. For example, only 67 of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1955 were still in it by 2011.19 Fewer than 10% of the 400 wealthiest Americans who appeared on the Forbes list in 1982, when Blade Runner was released, were still on the list in 2012.20 Capitalism is at its core dynamic, fluid, and daring.

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“In the absence of regulation and without consumer awareness—since consumers don't generally see the price due to insurance—the sky is the limit.”16 Blade Runner is now considered a classic of science fiction, but it bombed when it first came out. The film is now regarded as a masterpiece, with its striking billboard and bright neon advertisements dominating the skyline of Los Angeles in 2019. Ridely Scott, the director, had worked in advertising and knew the power of brands. In the original version of Blade Runner, Harrison Ford navigates a dark, rainy future as giant advertisements glimmer in the background. Scott was tapping into a deep fear that corporations will control our lives.

The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies
by Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini
Published 31 May 2012

And Han shot first, no matter what Lucasbot says in interviews with The Hollywood Reporter. That is all. A good science fiction film, like a good film of any genre, will stay with you. Unfortunately that’s true of bad science fiction films too. While I love thinking about the original Star Wars movies, Blade Runner (without the voice-over, and I can’t even remember which cut that is anymore) or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, I wish I could get Signs or Battlefield Earth out of my head. If only there was an Eternal Sunshine machine for movies. Sometimes science fiction movies can be used as allegorical satire, like Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Total Recall.

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I think it’s that science fiction films (and other media) offer two basic but very different views of the future: Utopian and Dystopian. Guess which of our favorite movies fall under? Of course, dystopian when the robots (The Terminator) or trash (Wall-E) take over. There’s much more fucked up shit going on in Blade Runner than there is in Star Trek. One has rogue robots killing people, the other has a holodeck where you can play tennis. The ultimate dystopian future film would have to be The Terminator. Even before Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor. Actually when you look at Predator now, with two muscle-bound state governors, you really think Carl Weathers should run for something.

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High concept, great characters, AND cool special effects. 4. Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) Creepy sci-fi horror followed by an action packed sequel. 5. The Matrix (1999) Mind-bending fun and introduced “bullet time” to movies and video games—even if it was quickly overused and went from cool to annoying in a very short period of time. 6. Blade Runner (1982) A thousand cuts of this movie exist. Just see the director’s cut. You don’t need the voiceover and yes, Deckard is a Replicant. 7. Metropolis (1927) A startling futuristic vision and an allegory for class warfare, all from Germany in 1927. You can see how it influenced modern science fiction films, from Star Wars to Dark City. 8.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot
by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy
Published 14 Apr 2020

In this prebiblical Greek myth, the sculptor Pygmalion has such contempt for prostitutes that he creates his own “perfect woman” from a block of ivory, Galatea, with whom he falls in love and marries.64 More recently, sci-fi stories continue to offer us glimpses of these feminized and sexualized ideals: women made and destined for the service of men. Let us remind you of some of the cast. Figure 5.6 Film still. Source: Blade Runner 2049 Back in 1964, the lifelike android Rhoda Miller TV show My Living Doll was described by the male lead as a perfect woman because she “does what she’s told” and “doesn’t talk back.”65 On the big screen, in Blade Runner 2049, K (himself a replicant, or in other words, an artificially intelligent being that looks and acts like a human) is in a relationship with a holographic fembot called Joi. In her first scene, Joi greets K dressed in a 1950s’ outfit consisting of a pinafore apron and pearls, presents a meal for him, asks him about his day, offers to take his coat, and lights his cigarette (figure 5.6).

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See Social robots Association for Computing Machinery, 172 Astro Boy, 49, 65–67, 70, 211 Atlas (Boston Dynamics), 51 Audiovisual technologies, 178 Austin Powers (film series), 14, 15 Australia classification and ratings system, 222 and ecological footprint model, 86 functionality and usability of smart wives, 31, 39 housework and gender, 6–7 RUOK Mate, 192 stalking, 199–200 Autism, 52, 74 Ava (Ex Machina), 14, 125 AYA (digital voice assistant), 221 Baidu, 4 Ballie (Samsung), 58–59 Barassi, Veronica, 196 Barber, Trudy, 117 Barbera, Joseph, 25 Barrett, Brian, 188 Bartneck, Christoph, 160 Bates, Laura, 61, 116, 134, 137–138 Beard, Mary, 167 Bechdel Test, 218, 286n35 Becoming Cliterate (Mintz), 122 Beer fridges, 35–36 Bell, Genevieve, 27, 97, 192, 213, 227 Benefits of smart wives, 9, 38–42 Berg, Anne-Jorunn, 32 Bergen, Hilary, 14, 99, 150, 152, 153, 157–158, 163, 164, 192, 193–194 Bezos, Jeff, 79, 80–81, 83–84, 97, 99, 109, 255n34 Big Brother, 175, 193 Big Five, 85, 107, 189 Big Mother, 193 Bipedal FT (efutei), 71 Birhane, Abebe, 174 Black Mirror (TV series), 218–219 Blade Runner (film), 14, 15, 64, 125 Blade Runner 2049 (film), 125 Blue Origin, 81 Body F (RealDoll), 119 Bogost, Ian, 164 Borg (Star Trek), 102–105, 106, 198 Borg, Anita, 212 Bose speakers, 185–186 Boston Dynamics, 51 Bowie, David, 210 Bowles, Nellie, 83, 200, 202 Boyhood, 204. See also Masculinity and technology Boys Will Be Boys (Ford), 56, 180–181 Brahnam, Sheryl, 161–162 Breazeal, Cynthia, 54, 59, 71 Broad, Ellen, 172 Broadbent, Elizabeth, 54, 70 Brothels, 113, 139 Brotopia culture, 10, 44, 163 Broussard, Meredith, 28, 74 Bud-E beer fridge (Anheuser-Busch), 35–36 Burke, Samuel, 59–61 Cairns, Ross, 200–201 Campaign against Sex Robots, 137 C & C Creations, 160–162 Capitalism and the environment, 80, 85, 87, 98, 100, 102, 105–107 Care2, 163 Care function of social robots, 13, 73–76 Caregiving, 7, 35, 52–54 Caring for social robots, 71–73 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US), 200 Chang, Emily, 10, 44 Chasin, Alexandra, 164–165 Chatbots.

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See Domestic (housekeeping) robots Housework (domestic work) environmental, 90 gender and division of, 6–7, 32, 40, 42, 46–47 men portrayed as incompetent at, 37–38 and promotion of smart homes, 33 and race, 25, 164 supporting men’s contributions to, 215–216 undervalued in smart wife design, 34–35 Hu, Jun, 160 Hui, Jennifer Yang, 104 Human connections with social robots, 51–52, 54–55 Humanizing of sexbots, 117, 118 Human relationships and technosexual experiences, 117–118 Human-robotic interaction field, 54 Humans (UK TV series), 64, 67, 126 Human–sex doll relationships, 126, 128–133 Hunches (Amazon), 190–191, 192, 194–195 Hysteria, 148–149 Hysteria (film), 148 I Am Mother (film), 198 Ian (Boston Dynamics), 51 IBM, 191, 226 iDollators, 126 Image-based sexual abuse, 134, 188 Incels (involuntary celibates), 129–130 India, 2, 4 Inness, Sherrie, 44 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 225–226 Intel, 227 Interdisciplinary approach to technology, need for, 213 International Energy Agency, 101–102 International Trade Union Confederation, 99 Internet access, 20 Internet companies in East Asia, 101 Internet of Emotions, 192 Internet of Shit, 97, 258n83 Internet of Things and Big Five, 85, 112 cybersecurity risks, 188–189, 193, 194 domestic abuse facilitated by, 201, 202 energy consumption, 89 Internet-related energy demand, 100, 102 iQiyi, 155 iRobi, 51 I, Robot (film), 67, 198 iRobot Roomba, 27, 28, 34, 40, 195 Ishiguro, Hiroshi, 62 IT sector’s energy footprint, 100, 101–102 Japan aging population, 53, 74 “average” girl as model for robot design, 51, 62–64 design of social robots and consumer expectations, 65–73 government’s plan for social robots, 13, 74–75 housework and gender, 7, 46 marriage and birth rate, 6, 13, 74–75 sex doll use, 128, 135 smart wife industry, 4 Japanese Robot Culture (Sone), 68 Jarrett, Kylie, 5 Jensen, Nathan, 85 Jet plane command systems, 16 Jetsons (TV series), The. See Rosie (The Jetsons) Jewish communities, 93 Jibo, 21, 49, 59, 249n42 Jobs, Steve, 10, 193 Johansson, Scarlett, 133, 134 Joi (Blade Runner 2049), 125 Joler, Vladen, 97–98, 99, 103, 107, 189, 220 June smart oven, 40 K (Blade Runner 2049), 125 KAI (Kasisto), 170–171, 219 Kawaii (cuteness), 68–70 Kember, Sarah, 150 Kessler, Suzanne, 62 Khrushchev, Nikita, 32 Killer apps, 28 Kim, Hyunsuk, 58–59 Kindle (Amazon), 81, 82, 83, 106 King, Ynestra, 80 Kircher, Athanasius, 189 Kismet, 51, 71, 73 Kissamitaki, Maritsa, 110 Kitchen appliances, 40 Kitchen debate (Nixon and Khrushchev), 32 Kondo, Akihiko, 126 Kuyda, Eugenia, 171 Lady Gaga, 126, 210 Lang, Fritz, 153 Large-eyed robots, 56, 68–69 Lars and the Real Girl (film), 130–131, 218 Laundroid robot, 29 Laundry assistants, 29–30, 34–35 La Vie Électrique (Robida), 150 Legal rights for robots, 173, 174 Legend, John, 165 Lennar Corporation, 82 Leong, Dymples, 104 L’Éve Future (Villiers), 152–153 Levy, David, 117, 126 LG, 26, 145–146, 148 Li, Fei-Fei, 212–213 Liautaud, Susan, 188 Light, Ann, 210 Likability of social robots, 64–65, 77 Lily (robosexual woman), 126 Limp, David, 79 Lin, Patrick, 135 Linguistic traits of robots, 68 Living democracies, 105–106 Lopez-Neira, Isabel, 201, 202 Lora DiCarlo, 123 Loss of control over smart wives, 193–194 Love and Sex with Robots (Levy), 117 Love Me (documentary), 129 Lumidoll, 119 Lutron, 92 Ma, Ricky, 133, 134 Maalsen, Sophia, 195 MacKay, Kevin, 85 Made by Humans (Broad), 172 Mail-order bride industry, 128–129 Maines, Rachel, 148 Maiti, Aki, 71 Male-identified robots and assistants, 16, 21, 71, 113–114, 161–162, 165 Malesky, Edmund, 85 Male-specific smart wives, 35–37 Manga (comic books), 65, 66, 68–69 Manners when using smart wives, 167–168 Manual work involved with smart homes, 43 Marcussen, Benita, 131–132 Maria (Metropolis), 67, 153 Mariette (Blade Runner 2049), 125 Marital rape, 8 Marketing smart wives to women, 182–186 Marriage and wife drought, 6–8 Marriage to smart wives, 126, 221 Marriage Trafficking (Quek), 129 Masculinity and technology, 10–11, 32, 34, 43–44, 176, 177–181, 202, 204 Matsui, Tatsuya, 71 Matsuko Deluxe, 210 Matsukoroid, 210 Mattel, 196–197 Maushart, Susan, 6, 7, 8 McCann, Hannah, 209 McKenna, Wendy, 62 McMahon, John, 25, 41 McMullen, Matt, 109, 112, 114, 115, 118, 121 Media equation theory, 159 Media reports of male violence against women, 214 Media representations of smart wives, 214–215, 217–219 Mellor, Mary, 86 Men & Dolls (Marcussen), 131–132 Metropolis (film), 67, 153 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 5 Microsoft as Big Five member, 85 Cortana, 11, 83, 146, 148, 154, 182 employment at and gender, 9 ethical guidelines for AI, 226 Ms.

The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019

After the film Total Recall was released in 1990 (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the hero Douglas Quaid), the idea of implanted memories burst into the popular consciousness. It was the second Philip K. Dick novel adaptation to feature false memories, as the original Blade Runner (released in 1982) explored a similar theme: one of the characters, an android, had “real memories” of childhood, but they turned out to be memories that were implanted. We’ll talk more about the source material for Blade Runner in the next chapter in the section on artificial intelligence. In Total Recall, Douglas Quaid goes to Rekall, a business that can implant memories of a vacation. In Dick’s world, it’s much cheaper to get a memory implant of going to the Caribbean than it is to actually go there!

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See AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence); AI (artificial intelligence); AI (artificial intelligence), history of Aserinsky, Eugene, 189 Ashely-Farrand, 206 Asimov, Isaac, 99 assembly language, 33 Asteroids, 36–37 Atari, 2, 4, 32, 38 atom, 167–68 atomic clocks, 170 augmented images, photorealistic, 63–64 augmented reality (AR), 62–64 Avatar, 58, 64 avatars, 44–45, 46f, 49, 273–74 B bag of karma, 117, 208 basic game loop, 31 BASIC programming language, 33 Beane, Silas, 255 Bhagavad Gita, 204–5 big game world, 30 “big TOE” (Theory of Everything), 156–57 biological materials, 3D printers, 71–72 bitmap, 163–64 black holes, 178–79 Blackthorn, 55 Blade Runner, 9, 77–78, 94 Blade Runner 2049, 65 Bohr, Niels, 13, 122, 124–25, 131, 167 Book of the Dead/Bardo Thol, 192 Boolean logic gates, 258 Born, Max, 131, 167 Bostrom, Nick, 5, 24–26, 105, 114–15, 220–21, 247, 281 Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, 110–11 Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, statistical basis for, 111–14 Brahman, 191 branching, 159 Breakout, 87 A Brief History of Time (Hawking), 10 Brinkley, Dannion, 229–231, 241 Buddha, 1, 183, 249 Buddhism, 14–15 Buddhist Dream Yoga, 191–94 Bushnell, Nolan, 34 butterfly effect, 18–19 Byte, 33 C c (speed of light), 174 C# programming language, 33, 171–73 CAD (computer-aided design), 287 Cameron, James, 64, 96–97 Campbell, Thomas, 156–57, 173–76, 250, 254–55 Capra, Fritjof, 203–4 Carmack, John, 59–60 central processing units (CPUs), 137 CGI (computer-generated imagery) techniques, 63–66 Chalmers, David, 246–47 chaos theory, 18–19 chat-bot, 31, 88, 98, 118 checksums, 256 Chess, 104 chess-playing computer, 86f Choose Your Own Adventure, 83 Christianity, 15–16 Christianity and Judaism, 223–25 Clarke, Arthur C., 96 classical physics, 29, 125, 161, 166, 283–84, 288 classical vs. relativistic physics, 122–24 Cline, Ernest, 56 clock-speed and quantized time, computer simulations, 171–73 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 232, 276 cloud of probabilities, 127 collective dream, 187–88 Colossal Cave Adventure, 27–29, 32, 34 Colossal Cave Adventure, map of, 29f computation, 18–19 computation, and other sciences, 287 computation, evidence of, 256–57, 267–68 overview, 246–47 computation in nature, evidence of, 263–66 computational irreducibility, 18, 79, 266 computer simulations clock-speed and quantized time, 171–73 . see also ancestor simulation; Great Simulation; Simulation Argument; simulation hypothesis; Simulation Point computer-generated imagery (CGI) techniques, 64–66 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing, 1950), 85 conditional rendering, evidence of, 253–55 conflict resolution, 173 conscious players, people as, 114–15 consciousness, 148 as digital informaion, 17–18 as information and computation, 82 consciousness, defined, 115–16 consciousness, digital vs. spiritual, 116–18 consciousness and metaphysical experiments, 249–250 consciousness as information, 104–5 consciousness transference, 198–99 Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation (Beane, Davoudi and Savage), 255 Copenhagen interpretation, 131 Cosmos, 251 CPUs (central processing units), 137 . see also GPUs/CPUs Creative Labs, 62 Crichton, Michael, 71–72 Crick, Francis, 116 Crowther, Will, 27 Curry, Adam, 76 D Dalai Lama, 207 Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation, 95–96, 115 Davoudi, Zohreh, 255 deathmatch mode, 43–44 Deep Blue, 86 DeepMind, 86–88, 94, 98 déjà vu, 240–41 delayed-choice double slit experiment, 145f delayed-choice experiment, 143–46 delayed-measurement experiment, 146 DELTA t (T), 174 Department of Defense (DOD), 232 Descartes, René, 11 DeWitt, Bryce, 149 dharma, 191 Dick, Leslie “Tessa” B., 8–9 Dick, Philip K., 274, 289 and alternate realities, 8–9 computer simulations and variables, 19 and implanted memories, 77–78 life as computer-generated simulation, 78–79 Metz Sci-Fi Convention, 1977, 2 question of reality vs. fiction, 71–72 simulated worlds, 80 speculative technologies, 53 digital consciousness, 116–18 digital film resolution, 65 digital immortality, 82, 105 digital psychiatrist, 88–89, 161 directed graph, 153–55 Discrete World, 165–66 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 9 Donkey Kong, 1 Doom, 43–44, 43f, 59–60, 137–38 DOTA 2, 87, 94 dot-matrix printers (2D), 69–71 double slit experiment, 128–29, 129f downloadable consciousness, 54, 101–4, 198, 207, 281 downloadable consciousness and seventh yoga, 197–99 Dr.

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Only by perceiving “another reality” is one of the main characters able to see an “alternate world” where the Allies won the war—which is our current world! Sometimes Dick’s stories dealt with artificial intelligence and fake memories more directly, both of which play a significant role in the simulation hypothesis. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which inspired the classic movie Blade Runner (starring Harrison Ford and directed by Ridley Scott), brings up the idea of false memories implanted in artificially created robots who look and act human. In fact, these androids may not even know they are artificial beings. This work raises serious questions about what it means to be human versus simulated or artificial consciousness, a topic we will explore in this book.

Geek Wisdom
by Stephen H. Segal
Published 2 Aug 2011

Whether through their own recklessness (Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison), by their own hand (Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway), or at the hands of another (John Lennon, Abraham Lincoln), the life lived in the clouds above mere mortals is frequently doomed to the fate of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and in his folly perished. Is it better for a superstar’s legacy if, like Blade Runner’s wild-eyed Roy Batty, they burn out rather than fade away? Or should the next wave of ambitious, creative visionaries buck this trend and stick around for their own third acts? The geek takeover of popular culture just may mean a shift in this unfortunate tradition; unlike rockers and replicants, one thing geeks are not is reckless. After decades of proudly gleaming Hollywood spaceships and robots, Blade Runner (1982) offered an alternate version of the future, full of grimy streets and corporate advertising.

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Goth-geek favorite filmmaker Tim Burton is a master of moody visuals first and a narrative storyteller only second. But he has called Edward Scissorhands (1990) semiautobiographical, which may explain why the plot is among Burton’s strongest. “THE LIGHT THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT BURNS HALF AS LONG … AND YOU HAVE BURNED SO VERY, VERY BRIGHTLY, ROY.” —DR. ELDON TYRELL, BLADE RUNNER DR. TYRELL WASN’T TALKING about rock and roll, but he might as well have been. See, when Neil Young told us it was better to burn out than to fade away, he wasn’t being sincere; his own status as the elder statesmen of grungy rock is proof of that. He was talking about an all-too-common phenomenon, though: Often, our most monumental cultural icons, in music or otherwise, are monumental in part because they were taken from us too soon.

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Eventually, they did. Thus Adama’s words, which first applied only to members of the military under his own command, came to embrace all of humankind, and humanity’s children as well. Bill Adama was actor Edward James Olmos’s second chance to explore dangerous, artificially created humanoids; the first was Blade Runner (1982). “MISTER MCGEE, DON’T MAKE ME ANGRY. YOU WOULDN’T LIKE ME WHEN I’M ANGRY.” —DAVID BRUCE BANNER, THE INCREDIBLE HULK “PARDON ME FOR BREATHING, WHICH I NEVER DO ANYWAY SO I DON’T KNOW WHY I BOTHER TO SAY IT, OH GOD I’M SO DEPRESSED.” —MARVIN, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY GEEKS notoriously have trouble expressing emotion.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
by Olivia Laing
Published 1 Mar 2016

Marooned inside this unnatural landscape, I could have been anywhere at all: London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, any of the technologically modified cities of the future, which seem increasingly to have been modelled on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with its floating adverts for Coca Cola and Off-World Colonies, its anxieties about the blurring between the artificial and the authentic. Blade Runner portrays a world devoid of animals, a visionary precursor of the robotic moment that Sherry Turkle predicted. What is it that Sebastian says, the prematurely ancient man-child, living alone in the leaking, debris-strewn splendour of a deserted Bradbury Building in a futuristic, sodden L.A.?

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.’: Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, pp. 146–7. 246‘Not really. I make friends . . .’: Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott (1982). 248‘But now that heightened . . .’: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, p. 178. 249‘All the animals come out . . .’: Taxi Driver, dir. Martin Scorsese (1976). 251‘What really twisted my brain . . .’: David Wojnarowicz, 7 Miles A Second, p. 15. 251‘The closing of the center city . . .’: Bruce Benderson, Sex and Isolation, p. 7. 252‘The tortoise lays on its back . . .’: Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott (1982). CHAPTER 8: STRANGE FRUIT 255‘the daily affirmation . . .’: Sarah Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind, p. 27. 256Larry Krone, Then and Now (Cape Collaboration). 258‘It was sort of a way . . .’: Zoe Leonard, Secession (Wiener Secession, 1997), p. 17. 259‘And it wasn’t the pneumonia . . .’: Billie Holiday, with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (Harlem Moon, 2006 [1956]), p. 77. 260‘to spell out all the things . . .’: ibid., p. 94. 261Zoe Leonard, ACT UP Oral History Project, Interview No. 106, 13 January 2010. 261‘From a distance . . .’: Jenni Sorkin, ‘Finding the Right Darkness’, Frieze, Issue 113, March 2008. 263‘String can be looked upon . . .’: D.

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Like he couldn’t conceive of pain attached to the body. It’s a statement about empathy, about the capacity to enter into the emotional reality of another human being, to recognise their independent existence, their difference; the necessary prelude to any act of intimacy. In the fantasy world of Blade Runner, empathy is what distinguishes humans from replicants. In fact, the film opens with a replicant being forced to undertake the Voight-Kampff test, which uses a kind of polygraph machine to assess whether a suspect is truly human by measuring the degree of their empathic response to a series of questions, most of them about animals in distress.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Closer examination revealed no passengers in the car, and none of the other cars in the “race” had drivers or passengers either. Viewing the event, in which the cars glided seemingly endlessly through a makeshift town previously used for training military troops in urban combat, it didn’t seem to be a race at all. It felt more like an afternoon of stop-and-go Sunday traffic in a science-fiction movie like Blade Runner. Indeed, by almost any standard it was an odd event. The DARPA Urban Challenge pitted teams of roboticists, artificial intelligence researchers, students, automotive engineers, and software hackers against each other in an effort to design and build robot vehicles capable of driving autonomously in an urban traffic setting.

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He still holds to the basic premise—the arrival of the AI-based corporation and the universal robot will mark a utopia that will satisfy every human desire. His worldview isn’t entirely utopian, however. There is also a darker framing to his AI/robot future. Robots will be expanding into the solar system, mining the asteroids and reproducing and building copies of themselves. This is where his ideas begin to resemble Blade Runner—the dystopian Ridley Scott movie in which androids have begun to colonize the solar system. “Something can go wrong, you will have rogue robots out there,” he said. “After a while you will end up with an asteroid belt and beyond that is full of wildlife that won’t have the mind-numbing restrictions that the tame robots on Earth have.”

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The scanner isn’t the only bit of info-security decor. The home itself is a garden of robotic delights. Inside in the foyer, a robotic arm gripping a mallet strikes a large gong to signal a new arrival. There are wheeled, flying, crawling, and walking machines everywhere. To a visitor, it feels like the scene in the movie Blade Runner in which detective Rick Deckard arrives at the home of the gene-hacker J. F. Sebastian and finds himself in a menagerie of grotesque, quirky synthetic creatures. The real-life J.F. lording over this lair is Andy Rubin, a former Apple engineer who in 2005 joined Google to jump-start the company’s smartphone business.

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
Published 15 Feb 2011

One of the most iconic images from Blade Runner. I was already riding the elevator down to my hangar and shouting at Max to prep the Vonnegut for takeoff. Continue your quest by taking the test. Now I knew exactly what “test” that line referred to, and where I needed to go to take it. The origami unicorn had revealed everything to me. Blade Runner was referenced in the text of Anorak’s Almanac no less than fourteen times. It had been one of Halliday’s top ten all-time favorite films. And the film was based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, one of Halliday’s favorite authors. For these reasons, I’d seen Blade Runner over four dozen times and had memorized every frame of the film and every line of dialogue.

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As the Vonnegut streaked through hyperspace, I pulled the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner up in a window on my display, then jumped ahead to review two scenes in particular. The movie, released in 1982, is set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, in a sprawling, hyper-technological future that had never come to pass. The story follows a guy named Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. Deckard works as a “blade runner,” a special type of cop who hunts down and kills replicants—genetically engineered beings that are almost indistinguishable from real humans. In fact, replicants look and act so much like real humans that the only way a blade runner can spot one is by using a polygraph-like device called a Voight-Kampff machine to test them.

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I instructed it to demagnify the scan of the wrapper and center the image on my display. As I did this, it reminded me of a scene in Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, uses a similar voice-controlled scanner to analyze a photograph. I held up the wrapper and took another look at it. As the virtual light reflected off its foil surface, I thought about folding the wrapper into a paper airplane and sailing it across the room. That made me think of origami, which reminded me of another moment from Blade Runner. One of the final scenes in the film. And that was when it hit me. “The unicorn,” I whispered. The moment I said the word “unicorn” aloud, the wrapper began to fold on its own, there in the palm of my hand.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Was it acceptable to deceive a person into believing a bot was human? The sudden appearance of AI-generated voice bots that were good enough to pass as humans accelerated interest in a “blade runner” law that would prohibit using machines to impersonate humans. Named after the 1982 dystopian sci-fi film in which Harrison Ford plays a “blade runner,” a police detective tasked with tracking down rogue synthetic humans, “blade runner” laws mandate that bots disclose they are a bot when interacting with a human. In the wake of the controversy following their demo, Google clarified that their bot would identify itself as an automated service, but there was no legal mandate at the time to do so.

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v=D5VN56jQMWM; Yaniv Leviathan and Yossi Matias, “Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone,” Google AI Blog, May 8, 2018, https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html. 121troubling ethical questions: Natasha Lomas, “Duplex Shows Google Failing at Ethical and Creative AI Design,” TechCrunch, May 10, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/duplex-shows-google-failing-at-ethical-and-creative-ai-design/. 121“blade runner” law: Tim Wu, “Please Prove You’re Not a Robot,” New York Times, July 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/opinion/sunday/please-prove-youre-not-a-robot.html. 121their bot would identify itself as an automated service: Kurt Wagner, “I Talked to Google’s Duplex Voice Assistant. It Felt Like the Beginning of Something Big,” Vox, June 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/27/17508166/google-duplex-assistant-demo-voice-calling-ai. 122California passed the first “blade runner” law: Bots: disclosure. SB 1001 (state of California legislative document), September 28, 2018, http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?

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At the immigration counter I handed my passport and visa to the officer, then a camera captured my face. It was so fast I almost missed it, even though I was watching for it. A video screen in front of me showed the camera’s view of my head, a green box around my face, then a quick snapshot as I was recorded. A smiling icon on the screen said in English, “Welcome!” Rather than a densely packed, Blade Runner–esque cityscape of pollution and high rises, Beijing is spacious and green. The day I landed, the skies were blue (an unusually good day for air quality). Trees and bushes line the streets, a welcome relief from the concrete jungles of American cities like LA, Chicago, or New York. Driving through it, the megalopolis seems never-ending.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict
by Kenneth Payne
Published 16 Jun 2021

A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

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The AI in movies looks rather more like a human than it does the AI we have today. Our AI plays chess like a grandmaster, but you don’t have to know very much about how it works to appreciate that we’re a very long way from the sinister Agent Smith of The Matrix and the Replicant hunting Deckard of Blade Runner. Still, perhaps we can learn something useful from Hollywood about warbots. First, quite simply, that AI has a strong hold on the public imagination—decades of hit movies are testament to our fascination with machines that think. Second, that these films are really about human stories, not machines.

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When film-goers watch AI, they aren’t just thinking about what makes the machines tick—they’re thinking about what makes us human. Our fictional robots are human-like, but not quite. Sometimes they struggle with an emotional awakening, a flowering of consciousness that is rejected by humans—that’s the fate of Rutger Hauer’s doomed ‘Replicant’ Roy in Blade Runner, reminiscing sorrowfully about ‘attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion’. Or they lack an appropriate emotional response—as with the coolly manipulative Ava, of Ex_Machina, and Scarlett Johansson as the enigmatic girlfriend in Her. It’s a well-worn trope. Hollywood’s AI sometimes has emotions, and often it’s self-aware.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

She is not rebellious like Zhora, but caring, sensitive, fragile and submissive. Blade Runner is one of a number of films and books to use the android metaphor to pose questions about the self and what it means to be human. As computers and genetics constantly push the envelope of how we manipulate our nature, ideas that were once never questioned suddenly come to the forefront. The Turing machine in the Imitation Game was both female and male. Its future offspring will be a cyborg, machine and human all in one. The delineations that once separated the artificial from the ‘natural’ are no more. At the end of Blade Runner, Rick Deckard suspects that he might also be an android.

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The scene in which Zhora the android stripper, hunted down by Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), is shot and dies in slow motion by smashing through successive glass windows is an unforgettable ode to human self-destruction. Zhora echoes the rebellious robot Maria of Metropolis. Her sexuality is a danger to society, a fact poignantly underlined by the artificial, satanic python she uses for her striptease number. Blade Runner is set in the year 2019, and as such is not too distant from the year 2026 in which Metropolis takes place. However, in this new version of the future, society has taken certain precautions: special executioners are employed to terminate rogue androids. Nothing is left to chance. Interestingly, the core female character of the film is the attractive, post-human Rachel, the cyborg sex slave of the Tyrell Corporation with whom Rick Deckard falls, inexorably, in love.

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These androids truly love us and want to be like us. But what if, instead of love, there is hate? Wasn’t it Freud who noted how love and hate are two sides of the same coin?7 What if the conscious machines of the future decide that we are not their friends but their enemies? What if the robots rebel, like Zhora in Blade Runner or Maria in Metropolis, and turn against us? What if The Matrix and Terminator are right in predicting our forthcoming slaughter by our ungrateful mechanical offspring? But isn’t fear of our children turning against us also part of the experience of love? Love is always uncertain. Our lovers, our children, may indeed abandon us, regardless of how much good we ever did for them.

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

Imagine that the colonists live in total isolation and one day we encounter the ancestors of the people who left our planet. They’ll speak their own language, have their own culture, and resemble us only partly. For each side, it will be like looking in an eerily distorted mirror. Our Cyborg Future It’s one of the classic scenes in movie science fiction. In the cult film Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty saves “blade runner” Rick Deckard from slipping off the edge of a tall building. With superhuman strength, Batty tosses Deckard onto the roof. He then sits cross-legged and waits for his preprogrammed four-year lifespan to expire. He says to Deckard: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. . . .

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If we follow the route of nanotechnology, space probes will be miniaturized and the lower costs of manufacture and propulsion will allow us to explore a broad new range of venues in the Solar System. Alternatively, we can use robots as proxies while we’re comfy in a control room on Earth. More radically, we might embrace the future seen in Blade Runner, where cyborgs are sent out to explore and toil. They’re imbued with artificial intelligence and superhuman powers, and they have a “kill switch” in case something goes wrong. Cyborgs could be our metaphorical children—the descendants of our species—spreading out into the cosmos long after we cease to exist.

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Turing wrote that “. . . at some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control . . . ,” and von Neumann described “. . . an ever-accelerating progress and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”17 A dystopian version of this event permeates the popular culture, from science fiction novels to movies such as Blade Runner and The Terminator. Doctor Frankenstein is destroyed by the powerful monster he creates—it’s a venerable morality tale. The possibility that advanced civilizations might be aggressive is the reason Stephen Hawking argues that we shouldn’t try to communicate or reveal our presence. The most chilling example of this scenario is seen in Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series of novels, where self-replicating doomsday machines are out there watching, ready to destroy life on a planet just as it begins to acquire advanced technology.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary
Published 3 Jun 2013

Also, the belief that one can subsist independently of environmental catastrophe is paralleled by fantasies of individual survival or prosperity amid the destruction of civil society and the elimination of institutions that retain any semblance of social protection or mutual support, whether public education, social services, or healthcare for those most in need. This remapping of the experience of reification can be illustrated by reference to the disparity of two related artifacts, one from the 1960s and the other from the 1980s: Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. In the near future of Dick’s novel, one of the rarest commodities is living animals, as most have become extinct due to environmental collapse and nuclear radiation. Large corporations invest in the small number that remain, and only the very wealthy could ever own one.

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gives way to something very different in its film adaptation. The novel’s account of the unremitting and petty ruin of individual experience is turned into a world-weary celebration of the petrification and “malign abstractness” from which Dick recoiled. Appearing during the early Reagan-Thatcher years, Blade Runner is an outline of a reconfigured relationship to an emerging global consumer culture that would be more securely in place by the 1990s. Rather than tracking any kind of split between the self and this milieu, the film affirms a functional assimilation of the individual into the circuitry and workings of an expanded field of commodification.

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It makes emotionally credible the bleak threshold at which the technological products of corporations become the object of our desires, our hopes. The film visualized the de-differentiated spaces in which machines and humans were interchangeable, in which distinctions between living and inanimate, between human memories and fabricated memory implants, cease to be meaningful. The dystopic disorientation of Blade Runner may seem to depict the texture of a fallen world, but there is no longer the recollection available even to care from what it might have fallen. Several decades later a related de-differentiation pervades most areas of mass technological culture. The fictive figuration of dreams as accessible and objectifiable is merely one part of the background to the unending demand for the externalization of one’s life into pre-made digital formats.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

Much of the look of the film, including the police spinners (flying cars) and the advertising blimps, was the work of Syd Mead, the film’s ‘visual futurist’. It was he who suggested the idea of a city where ‘decent people’ never venture below level 60. In the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, ground level is ‘a social basement, inhabited by low-lifes and criminals’.45 The gated communities of today’s Los Angeles have been lifted into the clouds. It is a measure of the film’s influence that real-life Angelinos now refer to ‘Blade Runner’ enclaves, by which they mean run-down areas, with street traders and decaying buildings.46 Scott’s vision of a future city in which scientists have the god-like power to create genetically engineered robots (‘replicants’) while the streets remain filled with rubbish, the air is polluted and society is still riven by inequality, seems to many people more convincing than most utopias.

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Or perhaps it is because, as Margaret Mead has said, Hell is always more convincing than Heaven.48 But in the future, cities will almost certainly develop at an uneven rate, just as they do today, with poverty and outmoded infrastructure existing alongside wealth and cutting-edge technology. As William Gibson – whose Neuromancer (1984) echoes Blade Runner’s future noir atmosphere – has said: ‘The future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed.’49 With its polluted, smoggy air and permanently rain-swept streets, Blade Runner also reminds us that whatever cities we build in the future we will have to live with the reality of climate change. Nobody yet knows how serious that will be and how our cities will have to change. But it is possible that in the far distant future, when humankind – like the first city builders – is confronted by a hostile climate and a now barren landscape, the city will come to our rescue, serving as a life-support system for the species.

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Ballard’s chilling novel High-Rise, a new residential block which is socially stratified, with the rich living on the upper floors, descends inexorably into chaos and extreme violence. The idea of a layered city also appears in one of the most famous films depicting the urban future – Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Set in the Los Angeles of 2019, the opening sequence shows the city from the air, stretching as far as the eye can see. This influential scene has become ‘a paradigm for the future of cities’, influencing many architects and designers.43 The sequence was filmed in the pre-CGI era, using a motion-control camera and a forced perspective miniature of the city, some fifteen feet wide at the back and just eight feet at the front.

Robot Futures
by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
Published 1 Mar 2013

These are early, and very eerie, projects dedicated to understanding how we think of robots, and where we place seemingly autonomous robots in our system of ethics, empathy, and action. In science fiction, the problem is reversed. In Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and the movie adaptation of his work, Blade Runner (1982), bounty hunters try to find and destroy renegade replicants—engineered beings with android brains. But replicant engineering has advanced to the point that these creatures are nearly indistinguishable from humans, yet they are enslaved in a system whose moral justifications are failing.

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But the irony is that, in our present-day nonfiction world, researchers are still busy trying to ascertain our human emotional response to robots. We do not even understand human empathy in the mixed-species world of humans and robots yet, let alone the emotional qualities of robots themselves. What 56 Chapter 3 makes this form of robo-ignorance even worse is that we do not fast-forward to the Blade Runner world overnight—rather, we will spend decades in intermediate stages, where the early robots out of the “womb” will be inferior to people in numerous ways, yet they will be social, interactive, and incorporated throughout society because they are useful enough to turn a profit for someone. How will we treat these pioneering robots, which will doubtless have characteristics we can easily take advantage of if we so choose?

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Index 3D Printing, 28, 30, 121 Abuse, 57–60, 117 Academia, 112, 113, 118, Accelerometers, xv, 36, 95, Accountability, 100–103, 107, 110, 117 Action, xvi, xviii, 60, 100, 103, 110, 111, 121 Adjustable autonomy, 45, 46, 77, 80, 102, 103, 121 Advertising, 4, 13, 14, Agency, 60, 61, 81, 121 Air quality, 74, 113–115 Analytics, 5–9, 12, 13, 121 Android, xiv, 29, 40, 55 Artificial Intelligence, xv, xxi, 79, 81, 98, 105, 118, 121 Attention dilution disorder, 65, 82 Batteries, 19, 28, 30, 33–35, 111 Big data, 6, 122 Blade Runner, 55, 56 Blue, xi, 10 Browser, 5, 7 BumBot, 24, 25, 110 Carnegie Mellon University, x, xviii, 113 Chips, 57, 58 Cognition, xvi, xvii, 11, 41, 122 Colonies, 40, 42, 97–99 Common ground, xix, 126 Community, 38–40, 43, 112–116 Computer vision, 11–14, 21, 23, 30, 39, 102, 103, 122 CREATE Lab, x, 113 Data mining, 6, 8–13, 16, 17, 81, 122 Dehumanization, 60, 63, 107 Dick, Philip K., 55 Digital walls, 14 Disempowerment, 110 Do-it-yourself (DIY), 25–27 Driverless vehicle, 49–51, 59, 60, Drone, 76, 102, 103 132 Electric motor.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

Even though he made the film at the tail end of the 1960s’ expansive, postscarcity, hippie-influenced, space race fever dreams, Kubrick’s vision is already melancholic, portraying the coming century as even more banal in some ways than his present. Only the alien technology reinvigorates wonder. A decade and a half later, Ridley Scott eliminates even the cosmos as a source of inspiration, with the twenty-first century’s “Offworld Colonies” in Blade Runner (1984) unseen, except in advertisements floating by on blimps. The success of Scott’s “retro-deco” style in Blade Runner essentially stopped the popular visioning of the future in its tracks, locking successive popular media futures into a permanent present of ever more encrusted layering of technologies and styles. Cohesive visions of the twenty-first century as a social or even technologically inspiring whole have been rare to nonexistent.

…

Mickey Alam Khan, “Potato Spurs Interest in Broadband TV,” DMNews (May 18, 2006), available at <http://www.dmnews.com/ Potato-Spurs-Interest-in-Broadband-TV/article/91210/>. 15 . See Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: New American Library, 1968), the novel upon which Ridley Scott based his film Blade Runner (1982). 16 . Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, intro. Anthony Vidler (1971; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). [1971]). The full video is available at <http://video.google.com/ videoplay?docid=1524953392810656786>. 17 . I first saw the Livre de prières at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2002 at a show of books and objects from library special collections in Southern California.

…

All hyperlinks current as of October 1, 2010 197 INDEX Adobe Systems, 55 Adstar, 177 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 152, 158 Advertisement, 184nn12,15 bespoke futures and, 107 culture machine and, 175–177 stickiness and, 23, 31 unimodernism and, 52, 57, 59 Affordances, 183n4 bespoke futures and, 121, 124, 129, 136 stickiness and, 16–17, 24, 28–35 unimodernism and, 68, 75 Web n.0 and, 80–82, 90 Afghanistan, 100 African National Congress, 113 AfterSherrieLevine.com, 41–42 Agee, James, 40–42 Age of Aquarius, 159 Agribusiness, 4, 10 Airplanes, xiii Alessi, 64 Algorithms, 46, 144, 174–177 Allen, Paul, 164 “All You Need Is Love” (Beatles), 62 Al-Muhajiroun, 134 Al-Qaeda, 134 Altair personal computer, 161, 164 Alto personal computer, 162 Amazing Stories (comic book), 108–110 Amazon, 68, 99, 145 Amis, Kinsley, 32 Animation, 55–56, 58, 110, 118 Antiglobalization activists, 98 AOL, 9, 53, 99 Apartheid, 112–113 Apple, 144, 163–167, 172, 186n12 Appropriate scale, 57 Aquarians, 24, 152, 159, 168–169 description of term, xv Engelbart and, 144, 157–167 Kay and, 144, 157, 160–167, 195nn16,17 Nelson and, 168 networked computers and, xv Sutherland and, 160–161 Arcades, 15, 71 Architectural Forum magazine, 84 Ariadne, 11 Arnold, Matthew, 14 Ars Electronica, 169–170 Art nouveau, 44, 66 “As We May Think” (Bush), 149, 157 AT&T, 144, 195n10 Atari, 165 Atlantic Monthly, 149 Atomic age, 146 as catalyst, xi Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi description of, xv emergence of, xi–xii 198 Atomic age (continued) Hiroshima and, 100–101 Manhattan Project and, 150 mutually assured destruction and, xi terrorism and, 100–101 Avant-gardism, 31, 44, 61, 117–120, 133 Babbage, Charles, 149 Bakri Muhammad, Omar, 134–135 Bali, 100 Ballmer, Steve, 164 Balzac, Honoré de, 44 Banham, Reyner, 10 Barr, Alfred, 117–118 Bauhaus, 117 BBC, 10 Beatles, 54–55, 62 Bebop, 25–27 Beirut, Michael, 102 Bellamy, Edward, 108 Benjamin, Walter, 88 Berg, Alban, 45 Berlin Wall, xvi, 85, 97, 99, 104 Bernays, Edward L., 123–124 Berners-Lee, Tim, 144, 167–169, 175 Bespoke futures adopting future as client and, 110–113 anticipated technology and, 108–110 crafting, 113–116 design and, 102, 105–106, 110–111, 115–116, 119–120, 124–125, 137 downloading and, 97, 123, 132, 138 dynamic equilibrium and, 117–120 89/11 and, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Enlightenment and, xvi, 129–139 information and, 98, 100–101, 124–126 lack of vision and, 106–108 markets and, 97–104, 118, 120, 127, 131–132, 137–138 MaSAI (Massively Synchronous Applications of the Imagination) and, xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193n32 199 modernists and, 105–108 mutants and, 105–108 networks and, 98–101, 108, 112–113, 116, 119–126, 133, 137 New Economy and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138, 144–145, 190n3 participation and, 98–99, 120–121, 129 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 prosumers and, 120–121 reperceiving and, 112–113 R-PR (Really Public Relations) and, 123–127 scenario planning and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 simulation and, 98, 121, 124, 126–127 strange attractors and, xvi, 117–120, 192n27 technology and, 98–104, 107–113, 116, 119, 125–127, 131–133, 136–139 television and, 101, 108, 124, 127–129, 133–137 unfinish and, 127–129, 136 uploading and, 97, 120–123, 128–129, 132 Best use, 10, 13–15, 138 Bezos, Jeff, 145 Bible, 28, 137 BitTorrent, 92 Black Album, The (Jay Z), 55 Blade Runner (Scott), 107 Blogger, 177 Blogosphere, xvii bespoke futures and, 101 culture machine and, 175, 177 Facebook and, 81, 145, 180n2 stickiness and, 30, 34 Twitter and, 34, 180n2 unimodernism and, 49, 68 Web n.0 and, 80, 92–93 INDEX Bohème, La (Puccini), 61 Boing Boing magazine, 68–69 Bollywood, 62 Bourgeoisie, 31 Bowie, David, 62 Braque, Georges, 93 Breuer, Marcel, 45 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthèlme, 3 Brin, Sergey, 144, 174–176 Broadband technology, 9, 57 Brownian motion, 49 Burroughs, Allie Mae, 40–42 Burroughs, William, 52 Bush, Vannevar, 52, 194n6 culture machine and, 144, 147–152, 157 Engelbart and, 157 Memex and, 108, 149–151 Oppenheimer and, 150 systems theory and, 151 war effort and, 150–151 Business 2.0 magazine, 145 C3I , 146–147 Cabrini Green, 85 Calypso, 25–27 Cambodia, 107 Cambridge, 17, 36 “Can-Can” (“Orpheus in the Underworld”) (Offenbach), 62 Capitalism, 4, 13 bespoke futures and, 97–100, 103–105 Sears and, 103–105 stickiness and, 13 unimodernism and, 66, 75 Web n.0 and, 90 Capitulationism, 7, 24, 30, 182n1 Carnegie, Andrew, 166 Casablanca (film), 90 Cassette tapes, 2 CATIA 3–D software, 39 Cell phones, xiii, xvii, 17, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 Chaos theory, 117–120 Chaplin, Charlie, 45 Cheney, Dick, 99 China, 104, 107 Christians, 135 Cicero, 47 Cinema, 8, 10 micro, 56–60 stickiness and, 15 unimodernism and, 47, 52, 56–60, 63, 71 Clarke, Arthur C., 174 CNN, 58 Cobain, Kurt, 62 Code breaking, 17–18 Cold war, 101 Cole, Nat King, 62 Commercial culture, 4–5, 8 bespoke futures and, 98, 102, 108, 120, 132–134 culture machine and, 153–156, 167, 170, 172, 175–177 copyright and, 54, 88–95, 123, 164, 166, 173, 177 Mickey Mouse Protection Act and, 90 open source and, 36, 61, 69, 74–75, 91–92, 116, 121–126, 144, 170– 173, 177, 189n12 propaganda and, 124 scenario planning and, 111–119 stickiness and, 23, 28–31, 37 unimodernism and, 41, 69 Web n.0 and, 82–86 Commercial syndrome, 85–86 Communism, 97–98, 103 Compact discs (CDs), 2, 48, 53 Complex City (Simon), 39 “Computable Numbers, On” (Turing), 18 Computer Data Systems, 145 Computers, xi.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

A national rebranding campaign was in full swing: “Made in China,” a label associated with cheap knockoffs, piracy, and stolen intellectual property, was being replaced with “Created in China.”2 Mike Daisy, a gonzo journalist, has described Shenzhen as a city where “Blade Runner threw up on itself.” An adventure story called “Mr. Daisy and the Apple Factory” was broadcast by This American Life in 2012. The podcast described massive electronics assembly plants in Shenzhen, where there has been a spate of worker suicides amidst abhorrent conditions—low wages, long hours, and the use of children as laborers. Foxconn, the company running these plants, is now the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. Dystopian high-tech Asian landscapes will be familiar if you are a fan of science fiction. In Blade Runner Harrison Ford hunts humanoid replicants within a sea of anonymous Asian extras, as Chinese gene designers sell their wares on the black market.

…

Enhanced Asians “with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream” leave Gibson’s readers with unease about the genetically modified elite that might emerge from underground laboratories in the East.3 Shortly after “Mr. Daisy and the Apple Factory” aired on the radio, Ira Glass retracted the episode, noting the misrepresentation of key facts. The retraction missed a banal inaccuracy, however. Rather than Blade Runner, Shenzhen looks more like San Diego or Orlando—but with some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. Palm trees and neatly manicured bushes grow in the median of major roads in Shenzhen, while scores of cellphone towers disguised as large pine trees sprout in urban neighborhoods. Large forested parks interspersed throughout the city help contain the sprawl.

…

Antonio had traveled to Guangzhou and Shanghai, where he talked with key Chinese scientists. In Guangzhou he had interviewed Dr. Junjiu Huang, the scientist who grabbed headlines in April 2015 for creating the first CRISPR-modified embryo. A movie trailer dramatizes his investigative journey with a dark ambient soundtrack that invokes Blade Runner: “It’s finding needles in stacks of needles,” Antonio says. “There is a cover-up. Babies whose genomes have been mutated as part of the international science race.”1 Antonio Regalado interviewed Jiankui He while on his investigative journey in China. The pair talked about his preclinical research with CCR5 and in broad terms about the future of related research in the clinic.

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing
by John Scalzi
Published 28 Jan 2007

I think some of the most successful literary-to-film transfers have been ones in which Hollywood does what Hollywood does—substantially guts and reworks the source material to adapt it to the needs of the filmmakers. The obvious example here is Blade Runner, which is of course a mightily reworked version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick. It's entirely possible a filmed version that is more faithful to the original novel could have been made; on the other hand, Blade Runner is excellent. It's a fair trade. (This is not to suggest I, Robot, the film, is on par with Blade Runner. It's not; as divergent as Blade Runner is from Electric Sheep, it shares the book's primary narrative themes, whereas mostly what I, Robot shares with Asimov's work is robots, and the use of the Three Laws of Robotics as a plot device.

The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron
by Rebecca Winters Keegan
Published 3 Nov 2009

Machines called hunter-killers round up the few humans left in the bleak, ash-strewn world for orderly disposal. And robots that look like people—Terminators—infiltrate the population. The Terminator wasn’t the first movie to raise questions about our reliance on machines—2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner both posited futures in which humanity’s mindless dependence on computers leads to grave consequences. But Cameron effectively coined the genre name “tech noir” when he chose that moniker for the nightclub where the Terminator first tracks down Sarah Connor. Since The Terminator, plenty of tech noir films have followed, such as Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca.

…

That comes from lack of confidence.” Cameron did muster the courage to seek out some other artists he idolized, Syd Mead and Ron Cobb. Mead, a onetime designer for Ford Motor Company, had reinvented himself as Hollywood’s “visual futurist,” concocting wildly imaginative vehicles for sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Tron. Cameron tracked Mead down in Miami, where the artist was engaged in another act of ocular fantasy—judging the 1985 Miss Universe contest. He FedExed Mead a copy of the Aliens script and asked the artist to tackle the Sulaco, the hulking spaceship that transports Ripley and the Colonial Marines to investigate what happened on LV-426.

…

In the spring of 2009, seventeen years after they split, Cameron eagerly left the Avatar set on a Friday night to take in a screening of Bigelow’s highly praised Iraq war thriller, The Hurt Locker, with his current wife, Suzy Amis. Cameron’s 1992 description of L.A.’s near future in Strange Days isn’t a wild Blade Runner vision with flying cars and perfect blond cyborgs. It’s grimly predictive—the future will be like today, he tells us, only worse. He’s a better macro futurist than a micro one. His idea of 1999 fashion—an “Auschwitz meets Metropolis look” for women and kilts and bicycle shorts for men—didn’t pan out, thankfully.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
by Diane Ackerman
Published 9 Sep 2014

Unlike Madame Tussaud’s wax-museum stars, today’s robots look lifelike enough to seem a bit creepy, with facial expressions that actually elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver. Equally realistic squishy bodies aren’t far behind. One can easily imagine the day, famously foretold in the movies Blade Runner and Alien, when computers with faces feel silicon flavors of paranoia, love, melancholy, anger, and the other stirrings of our carbon hearts. Then the already lively debate about whether machines are conscious will really heat up. This was always the next step toward designing a self-aware, agile, reasoning, feeling, moody other, who may look like you or your sibling (but have better manners).

…

They’re already a commonplace feature of the new normal. Not long ago the idea of a cyborg was pure science fiction, and we couldn’t get enough of the Six Million Dollar Man (who inspired many a roboticist), Star Trek’s Captain Picard (who has an artificial heart), or the species of moody Replicants in Blade Runner. Now we think nothing of strolling around with stainless steel knees and hips; battery-operated pacemakers and insulin pumps; plastic stents; TENS pain units that disrupt pain signaling in the nerves; cochlear implants to restore hearing; neural implants for cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, or damaged retinas; polymer and metal alloy teeth; vaccines hatched in eggs; chemically altered personalities; and, of course, artificial limbs.

…

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and National Gallery of Canada, 2003. Peterson, Brenda. The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World. New York: North Point Press, 2002. Pipher, Mary. The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture. New York: Riverhead, 2013. Pistorius, Oscar. Blade Runner. Rev. ed. London: Virgin, 2012. Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2011. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. ———. The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And
by Sonia Arrison
Published 22 Aug 2011

TYRELL: What seems to be the problem? ROY: Death. —Blade Runner FOR AS LONG as humans have been around, they have dreamed about living forever. Now, for the first time in history, science is bringing humanity closer to realizing that dream through advances that could potentially add hundreds of years to the average life span. This pivotal moment in time is not the random result of chance. Instead, it follows directly from a vast culture of human imagination and action directed toward the proverbial fountain of youth. Pop culture fans will remember how androids in the classic movie Blade Runner created havoc over their limited life spans—unlike humans, they had not devised creative ways of dealing with the unpleasant issue of death.

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See also Gates, Bill Biofuels Biogerontology Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy Biology bioinformatics do-it-yourself biology (DIY) as engineering project(see also Human Genome Project; Tissue engineering) as information technology new/smart biology synthetic biology Biotech Humanitarian Award Biotechnology, access to “Birthmark, The” (Hawthorne) Birth rate. See also Fertility rates Blackburn, Dr. Elizabeth Bladders Blade Runner (film) Blair, Tony Blasco, Dr. Maria Blindness(fig.) Blood pharming Blood pressure Blood transfusions Blood vessels Bloom, David Blue Brain Project Blumwald, Dr. Eduardo Boia, Lucian Bone marrow treatment Boomers Borlaug, Norman Boston University New England Centenarian Study Bostrom, Nick Boudreaux, Donald Bousada, Carmen Braga, David Brains mapping human brain Brazil Brin, Sergey Brown, Louise Brown, Timothy Brown-Séquard, Charles-Edouard Bubble boy disease Buck Institute Burn repair Burson, Harold Bush, George W.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Even innocent-seeming apps like the weather and ride-sharing are infested with tracking code. A mini-me PA will be a seductive choice. Why wouldn’t we want an able, considerate, smart helper who is always available, and mostly free? That used to be called a wife. But then feminism spoiled the party. She or he could, of course, in time, be a double agent. In a Blade Runner world, I could be turned in to the authorities by my own virtual mini-me. And she’ll know where the money is. Where the bodies are. Who my friends are, and how to find them. Can I run away? In a cashless world I will be using my phone to pay for everything at first – and then iris recognition, or fingerprints, or chip implant will do away with the need for external devices.

…

* * * Dmitry Itskov, the Russian internet mogul who founded New Media Stars, is working towards 2045 as the year we can make a digital copy of the brain that can be transferred to any non-biological carrier. * * * Do we want to live forever? Would we be human if we did? In the transhuman world to come, we will be hybrids, just as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are hybrids. Cyborg is the word we all know from Doctor Who and Star Trek, Terminator, Blade Runner. It’s a word that comes into coinage in the early 1960s, specifically around space-flight. The New York Times called the cyborg a ‘man-machine’. Our own experiences, to begin with, should be more modest than sci-fi, as implantable devices are cleared for use. Such devices might help with hearing or vision, and could work as pacemakers do now.

…

What is puzzling is why this history has been buried and distorted, and how and why women were driven out of computing science and programming to such an extent that young women now are being begged to consider what is mythologised as a male career. * * * 1984 seems to be a pivotal date. In 1984, in the USA, women made up 37% of all students taking computer science at degree level. In 1984 Apple launched the home computer. That first advert – directed by Blade Runner supremo Ridley Scott – features a young woman throwing a hammer through a dystopian propaganda screen. A woman … But … A year later, Apple was marketing its personal computers directly and specifically at males. It’s 1985, and Apple’s new TV ad, narrated by a male, is all about young Brian discovering his potential – even though the teacher in the advert is female.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Published 6 Dec 2016

www.fsgbooks.com www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks * If you’ve seen the word “sensorimotor” instead, please treat this as the same. * The cephalopods’ situation is reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, in which a class of artificial but human-like “replicants” are programmed to die after only four years. (In the book by Philip K. Dick on which the film was based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, their early deaths are due to breakdown.) Blade Runner’s replicants, unlike cephalopods, know their fate.

…

anomalocarids antennae, as tool of interaction ants apes aphasia aquariums Arendt, Detlev Arkaroola arms: of cuttlefish; number of; of octopuses arthropods auditory image Australia automobile, in aging analogy Baars, Bernard Baboon Metaphysics (Cheney and Seyfarth) baboons, communication and signaling in bacteria; see also specific forms Baddeley, Alan banjo rays Barron, Andrew bats; lifespan of beak: of cuttlefish; of octopuses Beer, Randall bees beetles behavior: cephalopod; learned; nervous system control of; in Octopolis; origins of; in response to pain Belarus Belize Bertram (octopus) “big bang” reproduction bilateral symmetry, bilaterians; brains in; two branches of binocular vision biological classification birds; lifespan of; memory in; smart; in tree of life; vision in Blade Runner blindness; perception of blood Boal, Jean body plans box jellyfish (Cubozoa) brain damage brains: of cephalopods; complex; energy expenditure of; evolution of; large; of octopuses; of prehistoric sea animals; purpose of; top-down vs. distributed; two hemispheres of; vertebrate; in vision Brancusi (giant cuttlefish) Brazil breathing broadcast theory, of information “Brother John” (monk) Budd, Graham bullying buoyancy, shells and butterflies calcium Caldwell, Roy “Cambrian explosion” Cambrian period camera eyes Cameroceras camouflage cannibalism, in octopuses carbon dioxide, atmospheric concentration of carbon monoxide poisoning Carey, Susan Caribbean Caribbean reef squid carpet sharks cats cause-effect loops cells: in aging; division of; reflecting centipedes Cephalopod Behavior (Hanlon and Messenger) cephalopods; arms of; color change in; environmental threat to; evolutionary path of; gender in; human engagement with; intelligence of; mammals compared to; mating and breeding in; remarkable qualities of; shortened and compressed lifespan of; two branches of; see also specific species chameleons Charles (octopus) chemical signals Cheney, Dorothy chickens, pain experiment on Chiel, Hillel child development, language in chimpanzees chordates; nervous system in chromatophores clams classes claws, as tool of interaction Clayton, Nicola Cloudina clumping, of cells cnidarians coconut shells cod coelacanth coexistence, without interaction colonies, lifespan in colony collapse color-blindness, of cephalopods color change: in aggression; of cephalopods; in cuttlefish “dream”; of giant cuttlefish; most extravagant; of octopuses; patterns in; perception of; purpose of comb jelly (ctenophore) common ancestors: cephalopod; electrical; of humans; mammal-cephalopod; tracing of; vertebrate-invertebrate split in; worm-like communication: in nervous system; through signaling; written; see also language complex active bodies (CABs) complex thought, in human mind compound eyes conductor, in nervous system analogy consciousness: evolution of; in human mind; language and; latecomer view of; perception at the edge of; roots of; theories of; transformation view of coordination: in multi-celled organisms; in nervous system; in social behavior Coprophanaeus beetles corals; environmental threat to corollary discharges corpus callosum crabs; in cuttlefish diet; in octopus diet; in tree of life creation myths, Hawaiian crows, intelligence of ctenophore (comb jelly) Cubozoa (box jellyfish) cuttlebone cuttlefish: aging of; behavior of; body change in; as cephalopods; gender in; ink; mating and breeding in; memory in; physical characteristics and appearance of; see also giant cuttlefish Darwin, Charles Dawkins, Marion dead zones deafness, complex thought and death: biological mutation and; external causes for; “hidden benefit” theory of; programmed; see also lifespans decapods deep-sea octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica); lifespan of Dehaene, Stanislas deimatic displays Dennett, Daniel dens: cleaning of; of cuttlefish; of octopuses; shared dermis Descent of Man, The (Darwin) Dewey, John Dews, Peter DF (brain damage subject) diaries Dick, Philip K.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al
Published 11 Apr 2022

There’s a dystopian side to all this density. In contrast to New York, Hong Kong’s towers meet the narrow sidewalks all the way to the front, without a setback. As a result, the city’s densely packed neighborhoods feel claustrophobic. With its skylines jammed with tall buildings and glaring neon lighting, the city is a filmmaker’s dream. Blade Runner took its inspiration from Hong Kong, a perfect backdrop for a futuristic society where urbanization has run amok. Most of the city’s tall residential buildings are nondescript. Developers crammed in as many residential units into each tower as possible. They squeezed bay windows onto the building’s outer faces, since they are not counted as maximum square footage by the government.

…

Or how I felt lost in the maze of crisscrossing elevated walkways and skybridges in the jumble of skyscrapers. Yet, the more time you spend in the city, the more you realize an underlying logic behind the seeming chaos. Hong Kong operates like clockwork. You can get to almost any part of the city, with its 7 million people, within only 40 minutes. Unlike in Blade Runner, you don’t need flying drones to do it. You need a subway system. While an underground system by itself is not much of a novelty, Hong Kong learned a lesson from Japan. In the early twentieth century, the Japanese government nationalized 17 of the 37 existing private railway companies in order to integrate the country’s growing railway infrastructure.18 This led the private railways, no longer allowed to compete for passengers with government lines, to almost collapse.

…

The nineteenth-century epitome, London, had its River Thames filled with putrefying carcasses, human waste, and rotting sludge. One hot summer in 1858 exacerbated the already foul-smelling scent to such an extent that it went into the history books as the Great Stink. Today, science fiction often depicts the “urban” as a dystopian, dense city of asphalt, where not a single tree or blade of glass is to be found. Think Blade Runner, its urban scenes permanently dark and overrun by buildings. The underlying assumption is that with economic growth comes environmental decline. And this is not too far from the truth. Even a nightly satellite view of the Earth shows urbanized areas as bright swaths of light. From above, darkness is a good thing, referring to nature, unlit.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
by William Gibson
Published 3 Jan 2012

In Istanbul, one chill misty morning in 1970, I stood in Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar, under a Sony sign bristling with alien futurity, and stared deep into a cube of plate glass filled with tiny, ancient, fascinating things. Hanging in that ancient venue, a place whose onsite café, I was told, had been open, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, literally for centuries, the Sony sign—very large, very proto-Blade Runner, illuminated in some way I hadn’t seen before—made a deep impression. I’d been living on a Greek island, an archaeological protectorate where cars were prohibited, vacationing in the past. The glass cube was one man’s shop. He was a dealer in curios, and from within it he would reluctantly fetch, like the human equivalent of those robotic cranes in amusement arcades, objects I indicated that I wished to examine.

…

I’m back to Tokyo tonight to refresh my sense of place, check out the post-Bubble city, professionally resharpen that handy Japanese edge. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan. There are reasons for that, and they run deep. Dining late, in a plastic-draped gypsy noodle stall in Shinjuku, the classic cliché better-than-Blade Runner Tokyo street set, I scope my neighbor’s phone as he checks his text messages. Wafer-thin, Kandy Kolor pearlescent white, complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral looking, its screen seethes with a miniature version of Shinjuku’s neon light show. He’s got the rosary-like anticancer charm attached; most people here do, believing it deflects microwaves, grounding them away from the brain.

The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985
by Jordan Mechner
Published 26 Dec 2012

July 24, 1982 The kind of movie I like best now is an “awesome” movie. 70mm, 6-track Dolby, clean print, big screen, third row, so that it fills my field of vision with a crisp clean color picture and my ears with crisp clean localized sound. It should be the kind of movie that creates a whole new world, that catches you up in a dream. E.T., Blade Runner. And the music, whether the heart-rending or heart-pounding music of John Williams or the eerie electronic sounds of Vangelis. Ohhh, there’s nothing like a movie. I hereby designate this class of movie “A” movies. A for scale. A for special effects. Note that even bad movies (Tron) can be A’s.

…

I played Aida on the stereo and then Pegasus on the Apple and then Aida again. I’ve got a dream: an arcade game that plays that certain part of the ballet scene from Aida, where it suddenly gets all fast and stringy. I’m so arcade-game psyched: It’s gonna be my life. I want to make arcade games like… Choplifter. E.T. The opening scene of Blade Runner. That feeling, right here (clonk on the chest) of being somewhere, of a whole new world… OhhhHHH! Didn’t study for Soc. I’ll blow it. December 18, 1982 I missed my Soc final. I couldn’t find it. I didn’t know what room it was in. Am I in trouble? December 19, 1982 CS exam was a flop.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Published 22 Nov 2013

Film prop design, therefore, might seem like good source of inspiration for these objects but as Piers D.Britton points out in "Design for Screen SF,"2 film props have to be legible and support plot development; they have to be readable, which undermines their potential to surprise and challenge. They are instrumental in moving the plot along. As director Alfonso Cuar6n puts it when talking about his film Children of Men (2006), "Also rule number one in the film is recognisability. We don't want to do Blade Runner-actually, we talk about being the anti-Blade Runner in the sense of how we were approaching reality. And that was kind of difficult for the Art Department, because I would say, `I don't want inventiveness, I want reference'. [...] And, more important, I would like, as much as possible, references of contemporary iconography that is already ingrained in human consciousness. ',3 This is the main difference between film props and the fictional objects of design speculations.

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
by Susan Schneider
Published 1 Oct 2019

However, a system passing ACT should be regarded as conscious and be extended appropriate legal protections. So, as we observe the boxed-in AI, do we recognize in it a kindred spirit? Does it begin to philosophize about minds existing in addition to bodies, like Descartes? Does it dream, like Elvex, the android in Isaac Asimov’s story “Robot Dreams?” Does it express emotion, like Rachel in Blade Runner? Can it readily understand the human concepts that are grounded in our internal conscious experiences, such as those of the soul or atman? We suspect that the age of AI will be a time of soul-searching—both of ours, and for theirs. Now let’s turn to a second test. Recall the thought experiment in which you had a complete neural replacement at Mindsculpt, creating an isomorph.

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See AI asbestos, 66 Asimov, Isaac, “Robot Dreams,” 57 astronauts and conscious AI, 41–43, 42, 103 Battlestar Galactica (TV show), 99 Bello, Paul, 159n1 Berger, Theodore, 44 Bess, Michael, 12 Big Think, 126 biological naturalism, 18–22, 34, 158n4 biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), 113–19 Black Box Problem, 46 black holes, 10 Blade Runner (film), 17, 57 Block, Ned, 159n1, 162n11 “The Mind as the Software of the Brain,” 134 body. See specific entries at mind-body Bostrom, Nick, 4, 77, 80, 151, 160n1 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies, 5, 105, 111–13 “boxing in” AIs, 53–54, 57 Brain Preservation Foundation, 126 brain-based materialism, 76–77, 80, 160n9 Bringsjord, Selmer, 159n1 Buddha, 76, 102, 137 CAC (computationalism about consciousness), 24–25 Cartesian dualism, 140–41 Center for Mind Design (thought experiment), 1, 3, 6, 12, 70, 88, 89, 94, 148, 150 Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, 110 cerebellar agenesis, 22, 63 Chalmers, David, 17, 18, 139 The Conscious Mind, 28 change, self’s survival during, 143–44 Chinese Room (thought experiment), 19–22, 20, 34, 148 chip test, 44, 57–61, 65, 67 cholera, 66 Clarke, Arthur C., 119 clinicaltrials.gov, 157n4 cognitive or functional consciousness, 49–50, 51, 67 cognitive science, 23, 158n9, 161n8 collective superintelligence, 111 combinatorial language-like mental representations, 116–17 Computational Cartesianism, 140 computational structure of alien brains, 115–16 computational theory of mind, 23–25, 78–81, 126, 158n4, 161n11 connectionism, 161n11 connectomics, 115–16 consciousness, 2–6.

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Las Vegas
by Mary Herczog and Jordan S. Simon
Published 26 Mar 2004

You might want to come for Alizé, one of the best restaurants in town, or the cloudlike beds, but beware: If you hate crowds, or crowds that make you feel fat, there are usually quite a lot of them standing between you and the guest elevators. The cyber-yuppie crowd loves Mandalay Bay for its post-millennial cool, a futuristic fusion of pan-Asian, Russian, and European elements; it’s Blade Runner meets the Forbidden City. Music folks like Mandalay Bay for its on-site House of Blues, but actual rockers more often head over to the Hard Rock to join an effortlessly sexy and cool clientele. Even the staff rocks: The April 2001 Playboy featured a “Girls of the Hard Rock Casino” spread. Bring earplugs, unless you already blew your eardrums out during that Pearl Jam show.

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On West Sahara at Mayflower Cuisinier, Hong Kong–raised chef-owner Ming See Woo is renowned for her Asian-FrenchCalifornian “mixed culture” fare: ginger-chicken ravioli with Szechuan peanut-scallion sauce, Mongolian grilled lamb chops in creamy cilantro mint sauce, and grilled salmon in ginger beurre blanc. The Venetian’s Tsunami has an immense pan-Asian menu, a free-form gastronomic merger. The melting sushi is endlessly innovative, as are the specialty infusion cocktails with names like Typhoon Rita and Tsunami Surfer. The decor—Blade Runner meets Kabuki via David Hockney—violates every feng shui principle, with jutting eaves, shifting perspectives, and clashing colors, but who cares? DINING 80 America. With a claim like that, how can you miss? Prices are cheap, but be sure to ask for the special menu of Northern Thai specialties to get the true experience.

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The pool is 25 feet at its deepest, 150 feet at its longest, and 100 feet at its widest, holding 1.5 million gallons, with seven underwater lifts and 217 numerous contraptions to adjust the pool’s size. The skeleton of a ship becomes a giant trapeze; walls form tangled mangrove swamps; the pool turns into fire; lunar modules crawl like crustaceans. Imagine an Esther Williams flick crossed with Blade Runner. The barrage of mystical, supernatural, and religious elements in Mystère, the acrobatic stage spectacle at Treasure Island, creates an effect more sensuous than any flesh show. It starts with a “Big Bang,” symbolizing early man embarking on a never-ending journey; “primitives” banging on Japanese Taiko drums coexist with Renaissance archangels, alien masks, and spinning flying saucers.

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy
by Caseen Gaines
Published 22 Jun 2015

At your leisure, look at the list of credits that Future alumni amassed prior to and since working on the films. While you may not recognize every person’s name, virtually everyone I spoke with worked on other movies that have received a substantial bit of attention over the years, such as Avatar, Blade Runner, Fight Club, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the original Superman franchise, and Titanic, to name just a few. They are incredibly talented visionaries, some of whom were already veterans when filming began in 1984, and others who were just getting started in the business.

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Although the aesthetic of Hill Valley, in both its past and present-day iterations, was an integral component of the first film, production designer Larry Paull was not rehired for Paradox. In their depiction of the future, the Bobs knew they wanted to avoid what they felt had become commonplace cinematically—presenting a bleak and desolate Orwellian world. Before working with Zemeckis, Paull had helped create the iconic look of Ridley Scott’s futuristic world in Blade Runner, which had earned him an Oscar nomination. There likely would have been differing opinions between Zemeckis and Paull about how to best realize the future in Paradox, just as there were differing opinions while making the original movie. In his concept for the first film, Paull sought to create a saccharine look for the 1955 set, which was then altered for the modern-day scenes.

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All of her clothes are completely revolting, and so are Biff’s. It’s easy, that stuff, because you just go to the wrong side. I suppose there was a counterbalance to what the rest of the film was doing with the optimistic Hill Valley future.” In designing the future, the team was able to flex their creative muscles. It’s true that “not Blade Runner” can only be carried so far as an edict, but Bob Gale’s screenplay provided valuable clues as to how the Bobs wanted the twenty-first century to appear on-screen. Technology would be more ubiquitous, but in a helpfully efficient way, not an oppressive one. Instead of trying to predict where technology was headed in the real world and forecast those guesses on-screen, Gale went for humor, expanding upon some of the gags from the first film, like Marty inventing the first skateboard, and including some in-jokes to mock 1980s popular culture, like the seemingly endless Jaws sequels and even the momentous appeal of Zemeckis’s own Roger Rabbit.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011

The book’s sequel, The Upside of Irrationality, is much more sanguine about “irrationality” in its title, if somewhat less so in the text itself. 13. Neurologist Antonio Damasio showed him a series of extremely emotionally charged pictures—a severed foot, a naked woman, a burning home—to which he barely reacted. Fans of Blade Runner or Philip K. Dick will recall this as almost the spitting image of the fictitious “Voigt-Kampff test.” Good thing he didn’t live in the Blade Runner universe: Harrison Ford would have decided this man was a “replicant”—and killed him. 14. The ultimate Turing test victory, you might say. 15. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, of the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), built in 1946 and initially used in the calculations for the hydrogen bomb, was the first fully electronic and fully general-purpose computing machine. 16.

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Yes, We Must,” Huffington Post, January 11, 2009. 24 Baba Shiv, “The Frinky Science of the Human Mind” (lecture, 2009). 25 Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (New York: Harper, 2008). 26 Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (New York: Harper, 2010). 27 Daniel Kahneman, “A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking” (lecture series), Edge Master Class 07, Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, Calif., July 20–22, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kahneman07/kahneman07_index.html. 28 Antoine Bechara, “Choice,” Radiolab, November 14, 2008. 29 Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Bros., 1982). 30 Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968). 31 William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in The Tower (New York: Macmillan, 1928). 32 Dave Ackley, personal interview. 33 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). 34 Hava Siegelmann, personal interview. 35 See Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck; or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 599–633. 36 Roger Levy, personal interview. 37 Jim Giles, “Google Tops Translation Ranking,” Nature News, November 7, 2006.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
Published 29 Aug 2021

Here, we ought to be concerned not just about the power that new forms of artificial intelligence are gaining over us, but also about whether and when we need to take an ethical stance towards them. For me, these questions evoke the uncanny sympathy I felt when watching Dave Bowman destroy HAL’s personality in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the simple act of removing its memory banks, one by one. In the greater empathy elicited by the plight of Ridley Scott’s replicants in Blade Runner there is a clue about the importance of our nature as living machines for the experience of being a conscious self. — This book is about the neuroscience of consciousness: the attempt to understand how the inner universe of subjective experience relates to, and can be explained in terms of, biological and physical processes unfolding in brains and bodies.

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Rabbi Loew’s golem reminds us of the hubris we invite when attempting to fashion intelligent, sentient creatures – creatures in the image of ourselves, or from the mind of God. It rarely goes well. From the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ava in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, by way of Karel Čapek’s eponymous robots, James Cameron’s Terminator, Ridley Scott’s replicants in Blade Runner, and Stanley Kubrick’s HAL, these creations almost always turn on their creators, leaving in their wake trails of destruction, melancholy, and philosophical confusion. Over the last decade or so, the rapid rise of AI has lent a new urgency to questions about machine consciousness. AI is now all around us, built into our phones, our fridges, and our cars, powered in many cases by neural network algorithms inspired by the architecture of the brain.

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Index action: perception and, 1, 2; voluntary, 1, 2, 3, 4 active inference: actions, 1; concept, 1, 2; control-oriented perception, 1, 2; free energy principle (FEP), 1, 2; generative modelling, 1, 2; interoceptive inference, 1, 2; minimising prediction error, 1, 2, 3, 4; robot design, 1; role in learning, 1; in social perception, 1, 2 Adelson’s Checkerboard, 1, 2 ‘affordances’, 1, 2, 3 AI (artificial intelligence): attitudes to, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; cybernetics, 1; development, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Geminoids, 1; machine consciousness, 1 (Fig. 21), 2; Singularity hypothesis, 1, 2; text generation, 1; Turing test, 1 Alexander, Scott, 1 algorithmic complexity, 1, 2, 3 allostasis, 1, 2 anaesthesia, general: algorithmic complexity analyses, 1, 2; art of, 1; effects, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; effects on mammals, 1; level of consciousness, 1, 2, 3, 4 animals, non-human: brain activity, 1; Cartesian view, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; consciousness, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; consciousness and intelligence, 1 (Fig. 21); criminal responsibility, 1 (Fig. 20); cybernetics, 1; embodied selfhood, 1; expression of emotions, 1; free will, 1, 2; interoceptive inference, 1; self–recognition (mirror test), 1, 2, 3; selfhood, 1; sleep patterns, 1; social perception, 1; see also monkeys, octopus Anscombe, Elizabeth, 1 Aristotle, 1n Aron, Arthur, 1, 2n arousal, 1, 2, 3, see also wakefulness Ashby, William Ross, 1, 2, 3 Aspell, Jane, 1 Ava (in Ex Machina), 1, 2, 3 awareness: animal, 1; bodiless, 1; conscious level, 1, 2 (Fig. 1), 3; detecting residual, 1, 2, 3; ‘islands of’, 1; mystery of, 1; self-awareness, 1, 2, 3 Baars, Bernard, 1, 2 Barnes, Julian, 1 Barrett, Adam, 1, 2, 3 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 1n, 2, 3 Bauby, Jean-Dominique, 1 Bayes, Thomas, 1 Bayesian: beliefs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; best guessing, 1, 2, 3, 4 (Fig. 9), 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; inference, 1, 2, 3 (Fig. 9), 4, 5; rule, 1, 2, 3, 4; theorem, 1, 2; theories of the brain, 1 beast machine theory: consciousness and being alive, 1, 2, 3, 4; core of, 1, 2, 3; final step in, 1; free energy principle (FEP), 1, 2, 3, 4; importance of interoceptive inference, 1; influences on, 1; robots and AI, 1, 2, 3; view of selfhood, 1, 2 beast machines: Cartesian view of animals, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; humans as, 1, 2, 3 beholder’s share, 1, 2, 3, 4 Berger, John, 1 Berkeley, Bishop George, 1 binocular rivalry, 1, 2, 3 birds, 1, 2 bispectral index monitors, 1 Blade Runner (film), 1, 2 Blanke, Olaf, 1, 2 body ownership, 1 (Fig. 17), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ‘body swap’ illusion, 1, 2, 3 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 1, 2n Bostrom, Nick, 1, 2 brain: ‘action first’ view of, 1, 2; activity patterns, 1; activity in psychedelic state, 1; amygdala, 1; auditory cortex, 1; avian, 1; brainstem, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; cerebellum, 1, 2, 3; cerebral cortex, 1, 2, 3; hemispheres, 1n, 2, 3, 4; hemispherotomy, 1; hippocampus, 1; imaging methods, 1; inferotemporal cortex, 1; injuries, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; insular cortex, 1; mammalian, 1, 2; motor cortex, 1, 2; parahippocampal gyrus, 1n; prediction machine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; split, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; supplementary motor area, 1n; thalamocortical system, 1, 2; thalamus, 1, 2; view of, 1; visual cortex, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Buckley, Chris, 1 Cambridge University, 1, 2 Čapek, Karel, 1 Carhart-Harris, Robin, 1, 2, 3 Carter, Michael, 1 causality, 1, 2, 3 cerebral organoids, 1 Cézanne, Paul, 1, 2 Chalmers, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Chang, Hasok, 1 change blindness, 1, 2 Chassenée, Bartholomew, 1 chatbots, 1 colour: best guessing, 1; ‘change blindness’, 1; The Dress, 1; experience of, 1, 2, 3; experiences of redness, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; ‘grapheme-colour synaesthesia’, 1; Humean projections, 1; octopus, 1; predictions about, 1; shape and, 1, 2 coma, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 complexity: algorithmic, 1, 2, 3, 4; of brain, 1, 2; measures of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; relation between complexity and regularity, 1 (Fig. 2) Conant, Roger, 1 conscious content: concept, 1, 2; ‘deep structure’ of perception, 1; emotions and moods, 1; machine consciousness, 1; mammalian species, 1; perceptual predictions, 1; psychedelic state, 1; relationship with conscious level, 1, 2 conscious level: brain dynamics and, 1; concept, 1, 2; IIT, 1, 2, 3; measuring, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; relation between conscious level and wakefulness, 1 (Fig. 1); relationship with conscious content, 1, 2; see also awareness conscious country, 1, 2 conscious self, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 consciousness: animal, 1; artificial, 1; ‘autonoetic’, 1; awareness, see awareness; behavioural properties, 1, 2, 3; brain basis of, 1, 2, 3; contents, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; covert, 1, 2; definition, 1; easy problem (s), 1, 2; functional properties, 1, 2, 3; hard problem, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13; informative and integrated, 1; integrated information theory, see IIT; intelligence and, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Fig. 21), 6, 7, 8, 9; levels of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; machine, 1, 2, 3, 4; mechanistic properties, 1, 2; meta-problem, 1; meter(s), 1, 2, 3, 4; neural correlates of, see NCC; neuroscience of, 1, 2; non-unified, 1; organoid, 1; phenomenological properties, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; real problem, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14; science of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; what is it?

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

For the foreseeable future, this sort of thing is firmly in the realms of fiction. Indeed, a world where robots were hard to distinguish from people was the basis for at least one very good film, Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner, in which a young Harrison Ford spends his days carrying out cryptic tests with the aim of determining whether what appears to be a beautiful young woman is in fact a robot. Similar themes are explored in movies such as Ex Machina (2014). Although Blade Runner scenarios are not in prospect, researchers have begun to ask whether there are variations of the Turing test which might meaningfully test for genuine intelligence, and which are resistant to trickery of the chatbot variety.

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A A* 77 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 205–8 accountability 257 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 87–8 adversarial machine learning 190 AF (Artificial Flight) parable 127–9, 243 agent-based AI 136–49 agent-based interfaces 147, 149 ‘Agents That Reduce Work and Information Overload’ (Maes) 147–8 AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) 41 AI – difficulty of 24–8 – ethical 246–62, 284, 285 – future of 7–8 – General 42, 53, 116, 119–20 – Golden Age of 47–88 – history of 5–7 – meaning of 2–4 – narrow 42 – origin of name 51–2 – strong 36–8, 41, 309–14 – symbolic 42–3, 44 – varieties of 36–8 – weak 36–8 AI winter 87–8 AI-complete problems 84 ‘Alchemy and AI’ (Dreyfus) 85 AlexNet 187 algorithmic bias 287–9, 292–3 alienation 274–7 allocative harm 287–8 AlphaFold 214 AlphaGo 196–9 AlphaGo Zero 199 AlphaZero 199–200 Alvey programme 100 Amazon 275–6 Apple Watch 218 Argo AI 232 arithmetic 24–6 Arkin, Ron 284 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) 87–8 Artificial Flight (AF) parable 127–9, 243 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 41 artificial intelligence see AI artificial languages 56 Asilomar principles 254–6 Asimov, Isaac 244–6 Atari 2600 games console 192–6, 327–8 augmented reality 296–7 automated diagnosis 220–1 automated translation 204–8 automation 265, 267–72 autonomous drones 282–4 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports 231 autonomous vehicles see driverless cars autonomous weapons 281–7 autonomy levels 227–8 Autopilot 228–9 B backprop/backpropagation 182–3 backward chaining 94 Bayes nets 158 Bayes’ Theorem 155–8, 365–7 Bayesian networks 158 behavioural AI 132–7 beliefs 108–10 bias 172 black holes 213–14 Blade Runner 38 Blocks World 57–63, 126–7 blood diseases 94–8 board games 26, 75–6 Boole, George 107 brains 43, 306, 330–1 see also electronic brains branching factors 73 Breakout (video game) 193–5 Brooks, Rodney 125–9, 132, 134, 243 bugs 258 C Campaign to Stop Killer Robots 286 CaptionBot 201–4 Cardiogram 215 cars 27–8, 155, 223–35 certainty factors 97 ceteris paribus preferences 262 chain reactions 242–3 chatbots 36 checkers 75–7 chess 163–4, 199 Chinese room 311–14 choice under uncertainty 152–3 combinatorial explosion 74, 80–1 common values and norms 260 common-sense reasoning 121–3 see also reasoning COMPAS 280 complexity barrier 77–85 comprehension 38–41 computational complexity 77–85 computational effort 129 computers – decision making 23–4 – early developments 20 – as electronic brains 20–4 – intelligence 21–2 – programming 21–2 – reliability 23 – speed of 23 – tasks for 24–8 – unsolved problems 28 ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing) 32 confirmation bias 295 conscious machines 327–30 consciousness 305–10, 314–17, 331–4 consensus reality 296–8 consequentialist theories 249 contradictions 122–3 conventional warfare 286 credit assignment problem 173, 196 Criado Perez, Caroline 291–2 crime 277–81 Cruise Automation 232 curse of dimensionality 172 cutlery 261 Cybernetics (Wiener) 29 Cyc 114–21, 208 D DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) 87–8, 225–6 Dartmouth summer school 1955 50–2 decidable problems 78–9 decision problems 15–19 deduction 106 deep learning 168, 184–90, 208 DeepBlue 163–4 DeepFakes 297–8 DeepMind 167–8, 190–200, 220–1, 327–8 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 87–8, 225–6 dementia 219 DENDRAL 98 Dennett, Daniel 319–25 depth-first search 74–5 design stance 320–1 desktop computers 145 diagnosis 220–1 disengagements 231 diversity 290–3 ‘divide and conquer’ assumption 53–6, 128 Do-Much-More 35–6 dot-com bubble 148–9 Dreyfus, Hubert 85–6, 311 driverless cars 27–8, 155, 223–35 drones 282–4 Dunbar, Robin 317–19 Dunbar’s number 318 E ECAI (European Conference on AI) 209–10 electronic brains 20–4 see also computers ELIZA 32–4, 36, 63 employment 264–77 ENIAC 20 Entscheidungsproblem 15–19 epiphenomenalism 316 error correction procedures 180 ethical AI 246–62, 284, 285 European Conference on AI (ECAI) 209–10 evolutionary development 331–3 evolutionary theory 316 exclusive OR (XOR) 180 expected utility 153 expert systems 89–94, 123 see also Cyc; DENDRAL; MYCIN; R1/XCON eye scans 220–1 F Facebook 237 facial recognition 27 fake AI 298–301 fake news 293–8 fake pictures of people 214 Fantasia 261 feature extraction 171–2 feedback 172–3 Ferranti Mark 1 20 Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project 113–14 first-order logic 107 Ford 232 forward chaining 94 Frey, Carl 268–70 ‘The Future of Employment’ (Frey & Osborne) 268–70 G game theory 161–2 game-playing 26 Gangs Matrix 280 gender stereotypes 292–3 General AI 41, 53, 116, 119–20 General Motors 232 Genghis robot 134–6 gig economy 275 globalization 267 Go 73–4, 196–9 Golden Age of AI 47–88 Google 167, 231, 256–7 Google Glass 296–7 Google Translate 205–8, 292–3 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) 187–8 gradient descent 183 Grand Challenges 2004/5 225–6 graphical user interfaces (GUI) 144–5 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) 187–8 GUI (graphical user interfaces) 144–5 H hard problem of consciousness 314–17 hard problems 84, 86–7 Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART) 277–80 Hawking, Stephen 238 healthcare 215–23 Herschel, John 304–6 Herzberg, Elaine 230 heuristic search 75–7, 164 heuristics 91 higher-order intentional reasoning 323–4, 328 high-level programming languages 144 Hilbert, David 15–16 Hinton, Geoff 185–6, 221 HOMER 141–3, 146 homunculus problem 315 human brain 43, 306, 330–1 human intuition 311 human judgement 222 human rights 277–81 human-level intelligence 28–36, 241–3 ‘humans are special’ argument 310–11 I image classification 186–7 image-captioning 200–4 ImageNet 186–7 Imitation Game 30 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 205–8 incentives 261 indistinguishability 30–1, 37, 38 Industrial Revolutions 265–7 inference engines 92–4 insurance 219–20 intelligence 21–2, 127–8, 200 – human-level 28–36, 241–3 ‘Intelligence Without Representation’ (Brooks) 129 Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems 100 intentional reasoning 323–4, 328 intentional stance 321–7 intentional systems 321–2 internal mental phenomena 306–7 Internet chatbots 36 intuition 311 inverse reinforcement learning 262 Invisible Women (Criado Perez) 291–2 J Japan 113–14 judgement 222 K Kasparov, Garry 163 knowledge bases 92–4 knowledge elicitation problem 123 knowledge graph 120–1 Knowledge Navigator 146–7 knowledge representation 91, 104, 129–30, 208 knowledge-based AI 89–123, 208 Kurzweil, Ray 239–40 L Lee Sedol 197–8 leisure 272 Lenat, Doug 114–21 lethal autonomous weapons 281–7 Lighthill Report 87–8 LISP 49, 99 Loebner Prize Competition 34–6 logic 104–7, 121–2 logic programming 111–14 logic-based AI 107–11, 130–2 M Mac computers 144–6 McCarthy, John 49–52, 107–8, 326–7 machine learning (ML) 27, 54–5, 168–74, 209–10, 287–9 machines with mental states 326–7 Macintosh computers 144–6 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) 306 male-orientation 290–3 Manchester Baby computer 20, 24–6, 143–4 Manhattan Project 51 Marx, Karl 274–6 maximizing expected utility 154 Mercedes 231 Mickey Mouse 261 microprocessors 267–8, 271–2 military drones 282–4 mind modelling 42 mind-body problem 314–17 see also consciousness minimax search 76 mining industry 234 Minsky, Marvin 34, 52, 180 ML (machine learning) 27, 54–5, 168–74, 209–10, 287–9 Montezuma’s Revenge (video game) 195–6 Moore’s law 240 Moorfields Eye Hospital 220–1 moral agency 257–8 Moral Machines 251–3 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) 306 multi-agent systems 160–2 multi-layer perceptrons 177, 180, 182 Musk, Elon 238 MYCIN 94–8, 217 N Nagel, Thomas 307–10 narrow AI 42 Nash, John Forbes Jr 50–1, 161 Nash equilibrium 161–2 natural languages 56 negative feedback 173 neural nets/neural networks 44, 168, 173–90, 369–72 neurons 174 Newell, Alan 52–3 norms 260 NP-complete problems 81–5, 164–5 nuclear energy 242–3 nuclear fusion 305 O ontological engineering 117 Osborne, Michael 268–70 P P vs NP problem 83 paperclips 261 Papert, Seymour 180 Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) 182–4 Pepper 299 perception 54 perceptron models 174–81, 183 Perceptrons (Minsky & Papert) 180–1, 210 personal healthcare management 217–20 perverse instantiation 260–1 Phaedrus 315 physical stance 319–20 Plato 315 police 277–80 Pratt, Vaughan 117–19 preference relations 151 preferences 150–2, 154 privacy 219 problem solving and planning 55–6, 66–77, 128 programming 21–2 programming languages 144 PROLOG 112–14, 363–4 PROMETHEUS 224–5 protein folding 214 Proust, Marcel 205–8 Q qualia 306–7 QuickSort 26 R R1/XCON 98–9 radiology 215, 221 railway networks 259 RAND Corporation 51 rational decision making 150–5 reasoning 55–6, 121–3, 128–30, 137, 315–16, 323–4, 328 regulation of AI 243 reinforcement learning 172–3, 193, 195, 262 representation harm 288 responsibility 257–8 rewards 172–3, 196 robots – as autonomous weapons 284–5 – Baye’s theorem 157 – beliefs 108–10 – fake 299–300 – indistinguishability 38 – intentional stance 326–7 – SHAKEY 63–6 – Sophia 299–300 – Three Laws of Robotics 244–6 – trivial tasks 61 – vacuum cleaning 132–6 Rosenblatt, Frank 174–81 rules 91–2, 104, 359–62 Russia 261 Rutherford, Ernest (1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson) 242 S Sally-Anne tests 328–9, 330 Samuel, Arthur 75–7 SAT solvers 164–5 Saudi Arabia 299–300 scripts 100–2 search 26, 68–77, 164, 199 search trees 70–1 Searle, John 311–14 self-awareness 41, 305 see also consciousness semantic nets 102 sensors 54 SHAKEY the robot 63–6 SHRDLU 56–63 Simon, Herb 52–3, 86 the Singularity 239–43 The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil) 239 Siri 149, 298 Smith, Matt 201–4 smoking 173 social brain 317–19 see also brains social media 293–6 social reasoning 323, 324–5 social welfare 249 software agents 143–9 software bugs 258 Sophia 299–300 sorting 26 spoken word translation 27 STANLEY 226 STRIPS 65 strong AI 36–8, 41, 309–14 subsumption architecture 132–6 subsumption hierarchy 134 sun 304 supervised learning 169 syllogisms 105, 106 symbolic AI 42–3, 44, 181 synapses 174 Szilard, Leo 242 T tablet computers 146 team-building problem 78–81, 83 Terminator narrative of AI 237–9 Tesla 228–9 text recognition 169–71 Theory of Mind (ToM) 330 Three Laws of Robotics 244–6 TIMIT 292 ToM (Theory of Mind) 330 ToMnet 330 TouringMachines 139–41 Towers of Hanoi 67–72 training data 169–72, 288–9, 292 translation 204–8 transparency 258 travelling salesman problem 82–3 Trolley Problem 246–53 Trump, Donald 294 Turing, Alan 14–15, 17–19, 20, 24–6, 77–8 Turing Machines 18–19, 21 Turing test 29–38 U Uber 168, 230 uncertainty 97–8, 155–8 undecidable problems 19, 78 understanding 201–4, 312–14 unemployment 264–77 unintended consequences 263 universal basic income 272–3 Universal Turing Machines 18, 19 Upanishads 315 Urban Challenge 2007 226–7 utilitarianism 249 utilities 151–4 utopians 271 V vacuum cleaning robots 132–6 values and norms 260 video games 192–6, 327–8 virtue ethics 250 Von Neumann and Morgenstern model 150–5 Von Neumann architecture 20 W warfare 285–6 WARPLAN 113 Waymo 231, 232–3 weak AI 36–8 weapons 281–7 wearable technology 217–20 web search 148–9 Weizenbaum, Joseph 32–4 Winograd schemas 39–40 working memory 92 X XOR (exclusive OR) 180 Z Z3 computer 19–20 PELICAN BOOKS Economics: The User’s Guide Ha-Joon Chang Human Evolution Robin Dunbar Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991 Orlando Figes The Domesticated Brain Bruce Hood Greek and Roman Political Ideas Melissa Lane Classical Literature Richard Jenkyns Who Governs Britain?

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

Fans tend to focus instead on tweaks to the action, because some directors cannot resist tinkering with the story as well as the image. George Lucas, who pioneered the use of digital cameras in the Star Wars prequels at the beginning of the 21st century, upset fans by adding new scenes and editing dialogue in the original Star Wars trilogy when it was remastered in 1997. DVDs of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) boast of a “futuristic vision perfected”, partly because of the improved special effects, but also thanks to a changed ending. There are other risks: though reels of film decay and are easy to lose, they can preserve a film for decades, whereas the longevity of digital media is less certain.

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For more explainers and charts from The Economist, visit economist.com Index A Africa child marriage 84 democracy 40 gay and lesbian rights 73, 74 Guinea 32 mobile phones 175–6 see also individual countries agriculture 121–2 Aguiar, Mark 169 air pollution 143–4 air travel and drones 187–8 flight delays 38–9 Akitu (festival) 233 alcohol beer consumption 105–6 consumption in Britain 48, 101–2 craft breweries 97–8 drink-driving 179–80 wine glasses 101–2 Alexa (voice assistant) 225 Algeria food subsidies 31 gay and lesbian rights 73 All I Want for Christmas Is You (Carey) 243 alphabet 217–18 Alternative for Germany (AfD) 223, 224 Alzheimer’s disease 140 Amazon (company) 225 America see United States and 227–8 Angola 73, 74 animals blood transfusions 139–40 dog meat 91–2 gene drives 153–4 size and velocity 163–4 and water pollution 149–50 wolves 161–2 Arctic 147–8 Argentina gay and lesbian rights 73 lemons 95–6 lithium 17–18 Ariel, Barak 191 Arizona 85 arms trade 19–20 Asia belt and road initiative 117–18 high-net-worth individuals 53 wheat consumption 109–10 see also individual countries Assange, Julian 81–3 asteroids 185–6 augmented reality (AR) 181–2 August 239–40 Australia avocados 89 forests 145 inheritance tax 119 lithium 17, 18 shark attacks 201–2 autonomous vehicles (AVs) 177–8 Autor, David 79 avocados 89–90 B Babylonians 233 Baltimore 99 Bangladesh 156 bank notes 133–4 Bateman, Tim 48 beer consumption 105–6 craft breweries 97–8 Beijing air pollution 143–4 dogs 92 belt and road initiative 117–18 betting 209–10 Bier, Ethan 153 Bils, Mark 169 birds and aircraft 187 guinea fowl 32–3 birth rates Europe 81–3 United States 79–80 black money 133–4 Black Power 34, 35 Blade Runner 208 blood transfusions 139–40 board games 199–200 body cameras 191–2 Boko Haram 5, 15–16 Bolivia 17–18 Bollettieri, Nick 197 bookmakers 209–10 Borra, Cristina 75 Bosnia 221–2 brain computers 167–8 Brazil beer consumption 105, 106 Christmas music 243, 244 end-of-life care 141–2 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 45, 46 shark attacks 202 breweries 97–8 Brexit, and car colours 49–50 brides bride price 5 diamonds 13–14 Britain alcohol consumption 101–2 car colours 49–50 Christmas music 244 cigarette sales 23–4 craft breweries 98 crime 47–8 Easter 238 gay population 70–72 housing material 8 inheritance tax 119 Irish immigration 235 life expectancy 125 manufacturing jobs 131 national identity 223–4 new-year resolutions 234 police body cameras 191 sexual harassment 67, 68, 69 sperm donation 61 see also Scotland Brookings Institution 21 Browning, Martin 75 bubonic plague 157–8 Bush, George W. 119 C cables, undersea 193–4 California and Argentine lemons 95, 96 avocados 90 cameras 191–2 Canada diamonds 13 drones 188 lithium 17 national identity 223–4 capitalism, and birth rates 81–2 Carey, Mariah 243 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 21 cars colours 49–50 self-driving 177–8 Caruana, Fabiano 206 Charles, Kerwin 169 cheetahs 163, 164 chess 205–6 Chetty, Raj 113 Chicago 100 children birth rates 79–80, 81–3 child marriage 84–5 in China 56–7 crime 47–8 and gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 obesity 93–4 Chile gay and lesbian rights 73 lithium 17–18 China air pollution 143–5 arms sales 19–20 avocados 89 beer consumption 105 belt and road initiative 117–18 childhood obesity 93 construction 7 dog meat 91–2 dragon children 56–7 flight delays 38–9 foreign waste 159–60 lithium 17 rice consumption 109–10 Choi, Roy 99 Christian, Cornelius 26 Christianity Easter 237–8 new year 233–4 Christmas 246–7 music 243–5 cigarettes affordability 151–2 black market 23–4 cities, murder rates 44–6 Citizen Kane 207 citrus wars 95–6 civil wars 5 Clarke, Arthur C. 183 Coase, Ronald 127, 128 cocaine 44 cochlear implants 167 Cohen, Jake 203 Colen, Liesbeth 106 colleges, US 113–14 Colombia 45 colours, cars 49–50 commodities 123–4 companies 127–8 computers augmented reality 181–2 brain computers 167–8 emojis 215–16 and languages 225–6 spam e-mail 189–90 Connecticut 85 Connors, Jimmy 197 contracts 127–8 Costa Rica 89 couples career and family perception gap 77–8 housework 75–6 see also marriage cows 149–50 craft breweries 97–8 crime and avocados 89–90 and dog meat 91–2 murder rates 44–6 young Britons 47–8 CRISPR-Cas9 153 Croatia 222 Croato-Serbian 221–2 D Daily-Diamond, Christopher 9–10 Davis, Mark 216 De Beers 13–14 death 141–2 death taxes 119–20 democracy 40–41 Deng Xiaoping 117 Denmark career and family perception gap 78 gender pay gap 135–6 sex reassignment 65 Denver 99 Devon 72 diamonds 13–14, 124 digitally remastering 207–8 Discovery Channel 163–4 diseases 157–8 dog meat 91–2 Dorn, David 79 Dr Strangelove 207 dragon children 56–7 drink see alcohol drink-driving 179–80 driverless cars 177–8 drones and aircraft 187–8 and sharks 201 drugs cocaine trafficking 44 young Britons 48 D’Souza, Kiran 187 E e-mail 189–90 earnings, gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 Easter 237–8 economy and birth rates 79–80, 81–2 and car colours 49–50 and witch-hunting 25–6 education and American rich 113–14 dragon children 56–7 Egal, Muhammad Haji Ibrahim 40–41 Egypt gay and lesbian rights 73 marriage 5 new-year resolutions 233 El Paso 100 El Salvador 44, 45 emojis 215–16 employment gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 and gender perception gap 77–8 job tenure 129–30 in manufacturing 131–2 video games and unemployment 169–70 English language letter names 217–18 Papua New Guinea 219 environment air pollution 143–4 Arctic sea ice 147–8 and food packaging 103–4 waste 159–60 water pollution 149–50 Equatorial Guinea 32 Eritrea 40 Ethiopia 40 Europe craft breweries 97–8 summer holidays 239–40 see also individual countries Everson, Michael 216 exorcism 36–7 F Facebook augmented reality 182 undersea cables 193 FANUC 171, 172 Federer, Roger 197 feminism, and birth rates 81–2 fertility rates see birth rates festivals Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243–5 new-year 233–4 Feuillet, Catherine 108 films 207–8 firms 127–8 5G 173–4 flight delays 38–9 Florida and Argentine lemons 95 child marriage 85 Foley, William 220 food avocados and crime 89–90 dog meat 91–2 lemons 95–6 wheat consumption 109–10 wheat genome 107–8 food packaging 103–4 food trucks 99–100 football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 forests 145–6, 162 Fountains of Paradise, The (Clarke) 183 fracking 79–80 France career and family perception gap 78 Christmas music 244 exorcism 36–7 gender-inclusive language 229–30 job tenure 130 sex reassignment 66 sexual harassment 68–9 witch-hunting 26, 27 wolves 161–2 G gambling 209–10 games, and unemployment 169–70 Gandhi, Mahatma 155 gang members 34–5 Gantz, Valentino 153 gas 124 gay population 70–72 gay rights, attitudes to 73–4 gender sex reassignment 65–6 see also men; women gender equality and birth rates 81–2 in language 229–30 gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 gene drives 153–4 Genghis Khan 42 genome, wheat 107–8 ger districts 42–3 Germany beer consumption 105 job tenure 130 national identity 223–4 sexual harassment 68, 69 vocational training 132 witch-hunting 26, 27 Ghana 73 gig economy 128, 130 glasses, wine glasses 101–2 Goddard, Ceri 72 Google 193 Graduate, The 207 Greece forests 145 national identity 223–4 sex reassignment 65 smoking ban 152 Gregg, Christine 9–10 grunting 197–8 Guatemala 45 Guinea 32 guinea fowl 32–3 guinea pig 32 Guinea-Bissau 32 Guo Peng 91–2 Guyana 32 H Haiti 5 Hale, Sarah Josepha 242 Hanson, Gordon 79 Hawaii ’Oumuamua 185 porn consumption 63–4 health child obesity 93–4 life expectancy 125–6 plague 157–8 and sanitation 155 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) 53 Hiri Motu 219 holidays Easter 237–8 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 summer holidays 239–40 Thanksgiving 241–2 HoloLens 181–2 homicide 44–6 homosexuality attitudes to 73–4 UK 70–72 Honduras 44, 45 Hong Kong 56 housework 75–6, 77–8 Hudson, Valerie 5 Hungary 223–4 Hurst, Erik 169 I ice 147–8 Ikolo, Prince Anthony 199 India bank notes 133–4 inheritance tax 119 languages 219 rice consumption 109 sand mafia 7 sanitation problems 155–6 Indonesia polygamy and civil war 5 rice consumption 109–10 inheritance taxes 119–20 interest rates 51–2 interpunct 229–30 Ireland aitch 218 forests 145 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 same-sex marriage 73 sex reassignment 65 Italy birth rate 82 end of life care 141–2 forests 145 job tenure 130 life expectancy 126 J Jacob, Nitya 156 Jamaica 45 Japan 141–2 Jighere, Wellington 199 job tenure 129–30 jobs see employment Johnson, Bryan 168 junk mail 189 K Kazakhstan 6 Kearney, Melissa 79–80 Kennedy, John F. 12 Kenya democracy 40 mobile-money systems 176 Kiribati 7 Kleven, Henrik 135–6 knots 9–10 Kohler, Timothy 121 Kyrgyzstan 6 L laces 9–10 Lagos 199 Landais, Camille 135–6 languages and computers 225–6 gender-inclusive 229–30 letter names 217–18 and national identity 223–4 Papua New Guinea 219–20 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Unicode 215 World Bank writing style 227–8 Latimer, Hugh 246 Leeson, Peter 26 leisure board games in Nigeria 199–200 chess 205–6 gambling 209–10 video games and unemployment 169–70 see also festivals; holidays lemons 95–6 letter names 217–18 Libya 31 life expectancy 125–6 Lincoln, Abraham 242 lithium 17–18 London 71, 72 longevity 125–6 Lozère 161–2 Lucas, George 208 M McEnroe, John 197 McGregor, Andrew 204 machine learning 225–6 Macri, Mauricio 95, 96 Macron, Emmanuel 143 Madagascar 158 Madison, James 242 MagicLeap 182 Maine 216 Malaysia 56 Maldives 7 Mali 31 Malta 65 Manchester United 211–12 manufacturing jobs 131–2 robots 171–2 summer holidays 239 Maori 34–5 marriage child marriage 84–5 polygamy 5–6 same-sex relationships 73–4 see also couples Marteau, Theresa 101–2 Marx, Karl 123 Maryland 85 Massachusetts child marriage 85 Christmas 246 Matfess, Hilary 5, 15 meat dog meat 91–2 packaging 103–4 mega-rich 53 men career and family 77–8 housework 75–6 job tenure 129–30 life expectancy 125 polygamy 5–6 sexual harassment by 67–9 video games and unemployment 169 Mexico avocados 89, 90 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 44, 45 microbreweries 97–8 Microsoft HoloLens 181–2 undersea cables 193 migration, and birth rates 81–3 mining diamonds 13–14 sand 7–8 mobile phones Africa 175–6 5G 173–4 Mocan, Naci 56–7 Mongolia 42–3 Mongrel Mob 34 Monopoly (board game) 199, 200 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 25 Moore, Clement Clarke 247 Moretti, Franco 228 Morocco 7 Moscato, Philippe 36 movies 207–8 Mozambique 73 murder rates 44–6 music, Christmas 243–5 Musk, Elon 168 Myanmar 118 N Nadal, Rafael 197 national identity 223–4 natural gas 124 Netherlands gender 66 national identity 223–4 neurostimulators 167 New Jersey 85 New Mexico 157–8 New York (state), child marriage 85 New York City drink-driving 179–80 food trucks 99–100 New Zealand avocados 89 gang members 34–5 gene drives 154 water pollution 149–50 new-year resolutions 233–4 Neymar 203, 204 Nigeria board games 199–200 Boko Haram 5, 15–16 population 54–5 Nissenbaum, Stephen 247 Northern Ireland 218 Norway Christmas music 243 inheritance tax 119 life expectancy 125, 126 sex reassignment 65 Nucci, Alessandra 36 O obesity 93–4 oceans see seas Odimegwu, Festus 54 O’Reilly, Oliver 9–10 Ortiz de Retez, Yñigo 32 Oster, Emily 25–6 ostriches 163, 164 ’Oumuamua 185–6 P packaging 103–4 Pakistan 5 Palombi, Francis 161 Papua New Guinea languages 219–20 name 32 Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) 203 Passover 237 pasta 31 pay, gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 Peck, Jessica Lynn 179–80 Pennsylvania 85 Peru 90 Pestre, Dominique 228 Pew Research Centre 22 Phelps, Michael 163–4 Philippe, Édouard 230 phishing 189 Phoenix, Arizona 177 Pilgrims 241 plague 157–8 Plastic China 159 police, body cameras 191–2 pollution air pollution 143–4 water pollution 149–50 polygamy 5–6 pornography and Britain’s gay population 70–72 and Hawaii missile alert 63–4 Portugal 145 Puerto Rico 45 punctuation marks 229–30 Q Qatar 19 R ransomware 190 Ravenscroft, George 101 Real Madrid 211 religious observance and birth rates 81–2 and Christmas music 244 remastering 207–8 Reynolds, Andrew 70 Rhodes, Cecil 13 rice 109–10 rich high-net-worth individuals 53 US 113–14 ride-hailing apps and drink-driving 179–80 see also Uber RIWI 73–4 robotaxis 177–8 robots 171–2 Rogers, Dan 240 Romania birth rate 81 life expectancy 125 Romans 233 Romer, Paul 227–8 Ross, Hana 23 Royal United Services Institute 21 Russ, Jacob 26 Russia arms sales 20 beer consumption 105, 106 fertility rate 81 Rwanda 40 S Sahara 31 St Louis 205–6 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 salt, in seas 11–12 same-sex relationships 73–4 San Antonio 100 sand 7–8 sanitation 155–6 Saudi Arabia 19 Scotland, witch-hunting 25–6, 27 Scott, Keith Lamont 191 Scrabble (board game) 199 seas Arctic sea ice 147–8 salty 11–12 undersea cables 193–4 secularism, and birth rates 81–2 Seles, Monica 197 self-driving cars 177–8 Serbia 222 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Sevilla, Almudena 75 sex reassignment 65–6 sexual harassment 67–9, 230 Sharapova, Maria 197 sharks deterring attacks 201–2 racing humans 163–4 shipping 148 shoelaces 9–10 Silk Road 117–18 Singapore dragon children 56 land reclamation 7, 8 rice consumption 110 single people, housework 75–6 Sinquefeld, Rex 205 smart glasses 181–2 Smith, Adam 127 smoking black market for cigarettes 23–4 efforts to curb 151–2 smuggling 31 Sogaard, Jakob 135–6 Somalia 40 Somaliland 40–41 South Africa childhood obesity 93 diamonds 13 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 45, 46 South Korea arms sales 20 rice consumption 110 South Sudan failed state 40 polygamy 5 space elevators 183–4 spaghetti 31 Spain forests 145 gay and lesbian rights 73 job tenure 130 spam e-mail 189–90 sperm banks 61–2 sport football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 grunting in tennis 197–8 Sri Lanka 118 Star Wars 208 sterilisation 65–6 Strasbourg 26 submarine cables 193–4 Sudan 40 suicide-bombers 15–16 summer holidays 239–40 Sutton Trust 22 Sweden Christmas music 243, 244 gay and lesbian rights 73 homophobia 70 inheritance tax 119 overpayment of taxes 51–2 sex reassignment 65 sexual harassment 67–8 Swinnen, Johan 106 Switzerland sex reassignment 65 witch-hunting 26, 27 T Taiwan dog meat 91 dragon children 56 Tamil Tigers 15 Tanzania 40 taxes death taxes 119–20 Sweden 51–2 taxis robotaxis 177–8 see also ride-hailing apps tennis players, grunting 197–8 terrorism 15–16 Texas 85 Thailand 110 Thanksgiving 241–2 think-tanks 21–2 Tianjin 143–4 toilets 155–6 Tok Pisin 219, 220 transgender people 65–6 Trump, Donald 223 Argentine lemons 95, 96 estate tax 119 and gender pay gap 115 and manufacturing jobs 131, 132 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 183 Turkey 151 turkeys 33 Turkmenistan 6 U Uber 128 and drink-driving 179–80 Uganda 40 Ulaanbaatar 42–3 Uljarevic, Daliborka 221 undersea cables 193–4 unemployment 169–70 Unicode 215–16 United Arab Emirates and Somaliland 41 weapons purchases 19 United Kingdom see Britain United States and Argentine lemons 95–6 arms sales 19 beer consumption 105 chess 205–6 child marriage 84–5 Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243, 244 drink-driving 179–80 drones 187–8 end of life care 141–2 estate tax 119 fertility rates 79–80 food trucks 99–100 forests 145 gay and lesbian rights 73 getting rich 113–14 Hawaiian porn consumption 63–4 job tenure 129–30 letter names 218 lithium 17 manufacturing jobs 131–2 murder rate 45, 46 national identity 223–4 new-year resolutions 234 plague 157–8 police body cameras 191–2 polygamy 6 robotaxis 177 robots 171–2 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 sexual harassment 67, 68 sperm banks 61–2 Thanksgiving 241–2 video games and unemployment 169–70 wealth inequality 121 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) see drones V video games 169–70 Vietnam weapons purchases 19 wheat consumption 110 Virginia 85 virtual reality (VR) 181, 182 Visit from St Nicholas, A (Moore) 247 W Wang Yi 117 Warner, Jason 15 wars 5 Washington, George 242 Washington DC, food trucks 99 waste 159–60 water pollution 149–50 wealth getting rich in America 113–14 high-net-worth individuals 53 inequality 120, 121–2 weather, and Christmas music 243–5 Weinstein, Harvey 67, 69 Weryk, Rob 185 wheat consumption 109–10 genome 107–8 Wilson, Riley 79–80 wine glasses 101–2 Winslow, Edward 241 wireless technology 173–4 witch-hunting 25–7 wolves 161–2 women birth rates 79–80, 81–3 bride price 5 career and family 77–8 child marriage 84–5 housework 75–6 job tenure 129–30 life expectancy 125 pay gap 115–16 sexual harassment of 67–9 suicide-bombers 15–16 World Bank 227–8 World Health Organisation (WHO) and smoking 151–2 transsexualism 65 X Xi Jinping 117–18 Y young people crime 47–8 job tenure 129–30 video games and unemployment 169–70 Yu, Han 56–7 Yulin 91 yurts 42–3 Z Zubelli, Rita 239

The One-Minute Workout
by Martin Gibala
Published 5 Jan 2017

The first workout of the study entailed four Wingates, or four rounds of cycling all out for thirty seconds each, with four minutes of rest in between. The training sessions took place in the lab at the Exercise Metabolism Research Group—a wide, low-ceilinged room filled with lots of computers, monitors, breathing tubes, and exercise equipment like stationary bicycles and treadmills. It wouldn’t look out of place in Blade Runner or the science fiction movies of Neill Blomkamp. The training sessions were pretty intense. In our write-up of the experiment, we noted that the subjects were “verbally encouraged” during their sprints. That’s a staid depiction of what actually happened. The atmosphere was as loud and enthusiastic as any I’ve seen in a laboratory setting.

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Aberdeen, University of, 225 Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge, 164 Adenosine diphosphate (ADP), 38 Adenosine monophosphate (AMP), 38, 39 Adenosine monophosphate activated kinase (AMPK), 38, 41 Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), 32–34, 38, 39 Adventure racing, 163–64 Aerobic fitness, 11–14, 25, 46–47, 54, 196 See also VO2max Aerobic workouts, 3, 17, 20, 45, 81, 107, 122, 124 high-intensity, 82, 113–14, 124, 128, 154, 192 Afterburn, 128–29, 211–13 Aging, 1, 46, 100, 121, 130, 175, 180–87 reversing normal effects of, 248, 250 AICAR, 7, 250–51 Air Force, U.S., 54 Air squats, 204, 236 American College of Cardiology, Sports and Exercise Leadership Council, 68–69, 84–85 American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), 7, 54, 68, 72–73, 80, 94 American Diabetes Association, 88 Anaerobic exercise, 14, 17, 20, 33–34 Archives of Internal Medicine, 76 Argentina, 222 Armstrong, Lance, 13 Army, U.S., 57–58, 61 Asmussen, Erling, 244 Athletics Weekly, 56 Atkins diet, 216, 229 Australia, 40–41, 102–4, 149–50, 209–10 Baar, Keith, 21 Bacon, Andrew, 241 Ball State University, 61 Bandura, Albert, 117 Bangsbo, Jens, 177–78, 182 Bannister, Roger, 13, 49–50, 177 Barbell squats, 35 Bascomb, Neal, 49 Basic Training Workout, 140–42 Basketball, 95, 132, 181, 195 Batterham, Alan, 100–101 Baumeister, Roy, 118 Bear crawl, 96 Beginner Workout, 137–39, 154 Bench presses, 182 Biddle, Stuart, 103–4 Bikes, see Cycling; Exercise bikes; Stationary bicycles Biosphere 2, 226–27 Blade Runner (movie), 18 Blair, Steven, 206–8 Blomkamp, Neill, 18 Blood sugar, 44, 173, 240, 247 in people with diabetes, 67, 87–92, 138, 156–57, 162 Body fat, 150 reducing, 137, 156 Body-mass index (BMI), 207, 227 Bodyweight exercises, 9, 35, 182, 202–3, 252 See also specific exercises Boot camp workouts, 50, 107, 108, 141 Borg, Gunnar A.V., 125 Boston Marathon, 69, 79 Bouchard, Claude, 239–40 Bowerman, Bill, 50 Bowers, Dick, 57–58 Bowling Green University, 57 Breathing rate, 32, 36 Britain, see United Kingdom British Army, 54 British Columbia, University of, 89, 107–9, 161, 196 Burns, George, 53 Burpees, 96, 98, 121, 128, 183–87, 236 in bodyweight exercises, 9, 197, 204 in Wingate Classic, 130 California, University of Berkeley, 51 Los Angeles (UCLA), 226 Calisthenics, 57, 149 See also specific exercises Calories, 101, 211–18, 221–31, 238 Canada, 50–54, 89, 98–99, 209, 239 Department of National Defence, 51–53 See also specific universities Cancer, 1, 93, 226, 242–43, 247 Cardiovascular disease, 68, 73–87, 114 interval training protocols for patients with, 77–87, 94, 143, 144, 156 reduced risk of developing, 1, 11, 75–77, 92–93, 181, 200, 225, 238, 250 VO2max and, 73–75 Cardiovascular fitness, 9, 17, 73, 82, 98, 187, 252, 254 Cell (journal), 7 China, Communist, 56 Christie, Jeff, 77, 86, 103, 114, 116 Chronic diseases, 46, 67, 207 reducing risks of developing, 71, 73, 192, 205 See also specific diseases Circuit training, 54, 99, 134, 176 Circulation (journal), 82 Coca-Cola, 222 Cold war, 50–51, 57 Columbia University, 184 Comparisons, avoiding, 119 Computer technology, 101 Confidence, boosting, 111, 113, 117–19 Cool-downs, 140, 188, 253 in protocols, 89, 94, 151, 170–72, 193, 210 in studies, 83, 85–86, 133, 199 Copenhagen, University of, 64, 138, 146–47 Muscle Research Centre, 60, 244–46 Copenhagen City Heart Study, 168 Coyle, Edward F., 21 Crab walk, 96 Crunches, 96 Curtin University, 102 Cycling, 2, 9, 36, 67, 92 long-distance, 14, 30, 35, 76, 168 in study protocols, 18, 40, 61, 98, 168–69, 179 in workouts, 128, 130, 143, 182, 204, 237 See also Exercise bikes; Stationary bicycles Denmark, 177 Diabetes, 132, 143, 223 interval training for people with, 67, 87–92, 94, 109, 118, 138, 157, 162 reduced risk of developing, 1, 11, 92–93, 144, 208, 225, 238, 250 Dundee, University of, 226 Eddy, Duane O., 61–62 Endothelial function, 84–85 England, see United Kingdom Endurance training, 5, 6, 13, 111, 178–79 athletic and health benefits of interval training compared to, 55–57, 74, 83, 167, 173, 192–93 physiology of, 30, 35, 37, 67, 57 in study protocols, 17, 19–21, 23–26, 39–41, 57–64, 69, 85, 132, 147, 152–53, 195–96, 209–11, 239–42 Epidemiological studies, 72, 92, 93, 167, 169 Esquire magazine, 7, 18, 170 European College of Sport Science, 60 European Heart Journal, 75 Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), see Afterburn Exercise bikes, 106, 121–22, 126, 128, 183, 233, 253 Basic Training Workout on, 141 for cardiac rehab, 84–85 Fat Burner Workout on, 151 Hickson protocol on, 178 High-Octane Ride, 237 Midwestern Workout on, 159 One-Minute Workout on, 173, 174, 176 for spin classes, 99, 107, 122, 208 Tabata Classic on, 195 Ten by One Workout on, 89, 109 See also Stationary bicycles Exercise Metabolism Research Group, 18 Exercise pills, 7, 244, 250–51 Exerkines, 249–51 Exertion ratings, 125–28 Facebook, 2 Fast Diet, The (Mosley), 227 Fat Burner Workout, 131, 149–51, 182, 207, 210 Finland, 47 5BX, 52–54 Florida State University, 118 Fonda, Jane, 50 Foster, Carl, 54, 80 Fox, Edward L., 57–59, 61, 63, 79 France, 75–67 Freiburg University, 55 Friends (TV sitcom), 235, 236 Frog hops, 96 Frontiers of Psychology (journal), 102 Frozen Otter Ultra Trek, 164 Gatorade, 222 Sports Science Institute (GSSI), 31 Generation 100 study, 93–94 Germany, 55–56 Gerschler, Woldemar, 55–56 Gibala, Lisa, 10, 235 Go-To Workout, 134, 176, 202–4 Guardian (newspaper), 48, 207 Guidelines, public health, 8, 12, 23, 73, 92–94 Hägg, Gunder, 49 Harbig, Rudolf, 56 Hardcastle, Sarah, 102–4 Hargiss, Homer Woodson “Bill,” 50 Hargreaves, Mark, 30–31, 40 Harridge, Stephen, 180 Hartford (Connecticut) Hospital, 69 Harvard University, 93, 101 School of Public Health, 221 Harvey Nichols (department store), 238 Hawley, John, 250, 251 Health and Fitness Journal, 54 Heart (journal), 75 Heart disease, see Cardiovascular disease Heart rate, 23, 76, 115, 124–26, 132 breathing rate and, 32, 36 in study protocols, 83, 86–87, 89–90, 105, 109, 212 during workouts, 130, 183, 184, 193, 195, 202–4 Heriot-Watt University, 170 HERITAGE Family Study, 239–41 Hickson, Robert, 178–79 High-Octane Ride exercise bike, 237–39 High steps, 96 Hippocrates, 71 Hockey, 51–52, 95, 131–32, 181, 182, 253 Holloszy, John, 250, 251 Homeostasis, 36, 43–45 How They Train (Wilt), 48 Illinois, University of, 51, 52 at Chicago, 159 India, 56 Industrial revolution, 101 Insulin resistance, 87–88, 91–92, 162 Interleukin-6 (IL-6), 244–47 International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 103 Internet, 227 Intervall-training, Das (Gerschler), 56 Interval Training (Fox and Mathews), 59 Israel, 223 Italy, 177 Jacobs, A.

Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things
by Donald A. Norman
Published 10 May 2005

Even perfect replicas of humans might be problematic, for even if the robot could not be distinguished from humans, this very lack of distinction can lead to emotional angst (a theme explored in many a science fiction novel, especially Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and, in movie version, Blade Runner). According to this line of argument, C3PO gets away with its humanoid form because it is so clumsy, both in manner and behavior, that it appears more cute or even irritating than threatening. Robots that serve human needs—for example, robots as pets— should probably look like living creatures, if only to tap into our visceral system, which is prewired to interpret human and animal body language and facial expressions.

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See also Robots, Asimov's laws of robotics ATMs, 17 Attention, 152,153, 154, 155,156,157,167, 192, 193,194 divided, 157 Attractiveness, 87 Audi TT design, 68 Automation, 205, 207 Automobiles, 23, 26, 41,45, 56, 67,68(fig.), 68, 72, 73, 74,76, 87,93, 109,118,132, 136, 140,148,155,156,171, 187,199, 200, 204,219,224 and cell phone vs. passenger conversations, 155-156 and co-evolution, 171 cup holders for, 73-74 customization of, 224 seat adjustment control for, 76,77(fig.), 214 See also under Safety issues Aviation, 145, 204 Banana Republic, 92,93 Batteries, 72-73 BBN (company), 189 Beauty, 4, 8,18, 47, 65, 67,102,103, 109-110,227 and reflective level, 87 See also Aesthetics Beeps, 119 Behavioral-level processing, 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39,40, 56, 60, 82,90, 95,105,115,137,155,185 components of good behavioral design, 69-70 and films, 124-126, 127,129 and music, 115,116, 117 and vicarious experience, 116 See also Design, behavioral Betty Crocker Company, 55-56 Biel, Switzerland, 85 Birds, 65-66 Blade Runner (film), 176 Blake, Randolph, 165 Blaming, 138-141 Bobrow, Daniel, 189-191 Body language, 135-136, 163, 176, 178, 180, 185, 191 Bonding, 150, 220 Books,10,44,128,132,133,220 Boorstin, Jon, 123-126,127 Bottles, 63-65, 87,99, 215 Bradley, Paul, 221 Brain, 8, 11, 20, 23, 29-33,79, 115 bottom-up/top-down processing of, 25—26 and expectations, 108 levels of brain mechanisms, 21, 53 Brainstorming, 19, 27 Brand, Stuart,220 Brands, 54, 59-60, 64, 65, 105 Breazeal, Cynthia, 180,181 (fig.), 191 Brooks, Rodney, 173 Bystander apathy, 144—145 Cake mixes, 55—56 Can openers, 215 Carelman, Jacques, 3 Causes, 139,140, 168 Cell phones, 71, 72,105,119-120,121,122, 140,148,149-155,158,159, 219 as emotional tool, 150, 151, 152, 153 hands-free phones, 155 Change, 220-221 Chess, 208 Children, 165, 170,198 Children's items, 67 Choices, 225.

Tails I Lose: The Compulsive Gambler Who Lost His Shirt for Good
by Justyn Rees
Published 25 Jun 2014

Officer cadets at Sandhurst live under constant scrutiny. Each cadet in the intake is graded, from the top performer to the lowest. If you’re in the bottom half you know you stand a chance of being “chopped”, and it’s back to civilian life very quickly. In the top group, you have a chance of being awarded the Sword of Honour: you are a “Blade Runner”. Being in the middle is a good thing because you don’t face the risk of being chopped, but you also don’t get the added pressure of being in the spotlight all the time. If you have performed well, during the final term you are awarded a cadet rank. These ranks vary depending on how you are doing.

…

All the senior directing staff, or “DS”, as they were known, would arrive just before I gave my orders, to assess the quality (or otherwise) of my plan, the level of detail and the confidence of my delivery. Cadets are divided into units, or platoons, of about thirty. This is the standard fighting unit in an infantry battalion. If a platoon is unlucky enough to have a “Blade Runner” in their midst, it usually means they all have to work harder and get less sleep, as the “lucky” cadet is put in situations where he can be tested. For me, this meant I became quite unpopular with my fellow cadets and it became a bit of a joke, as every time the “top brass” turned up when we were on exercise, it meant something was about to “kick off ”.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter
Published 16 Oct 2013

In contrast, if we fail to get an artificial life form after an effort to create a chemical system . . . , we must conclude that our theory of life is missing something. —Steven A. Benner, 20091 Humans have long been fascinated with the notion of artificial life. From the medieval homunculus of Paracelsus and the golem of Jewish folklore to the creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the “replicants” of Blade Runner, mythology, legend, and popular culture are replete with tales of synthetic and robotic life. However, devising a precise definition that captures the distinction between life and non-life, or between biological life and machine life, has been a major and continuing challenge for science and philosophy alike.

…

Abraham, Spencer, 77 acne, 176 agriculture, 83 See also food Aldini, Giovanni, 12 Allentoft, Morten Erik, 182 Alperovich, Nina, 101 Altman, Sidney, 132 Alzheimer’s disease, 43 American Prometheus, 125 amino acids, 151 Anderson, Chris, 177 The Andromeda Strain, 185 antibiotic selection, 58 antibiotics: and bacteria, 170–2 bacteriophage, 172–5 and ribosomes, 39 treatment made possible, 57 aperiodic crystal, 3–5, 7, 26, 40 Applied Biosystems, 50 The Arabian Nights, 160 Arber, Werner, 31–2 Aristotle, 9, 25, 81 Armageddon, 90 Arrowsmith (Lewis), 9 artificial intelligence, 22 artificial life, 8, 19, 21–3, 129 Asilomar, 32, 153–4 ATP (adenosine triphosphate), 36 Avery, Oswald, 26–30, 170 epigraph, 25 Avida, 22 Bacon, Francis, 78 New Atlantis, 10 bacteria, 115, 130, 174, 176 and antibiotics, 170–2 bacteriophage, 172–5 chromosomes in, 99–100 Gram staining of, 53 lateral gene transfer, 171 bacteriophage, 172–5 Baltimore, David, 66–7 Barricelli, Nils Aall, 22 BBC, 128 belief: and science, 24, 30 See also religion; vitalism Benders, Gwyn, 113 Benner, Steven A., epigraph, 8 Bennet, Charles H., 161 Berg, Paul, 32–3, 83 Bergson, Henri, 17 Bernal, John Desmond, The World, the Flesh & the Devil, 19 Berzelius, Jöns Jacob, 11–3, 15 Billeter, Martin, 67 bio-circuits, 147–8 BioBricks, 147, 149 BioFactory, 148 Biogenic Law, 15 biohackers, 155 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, 153 biology, 163 birth of, 1 central problems of, 3 and computers, 139, 145–6 as control of life, 9 digitization of, 125 DNA-centric view of, 18 as information science, 5 molecular, 31, 34, 37, 83, 131 Registry of Standard Biological Parts, 147 synthetic, 83, 139, 151, 154, 156–7 See also teleportation bioluminescence, 112 biotechnology revolution, 33–4 bioterrorism, 155, 157 Blade Runner, 8 Blattner, Frederick, 84 Blue Gene, 41–2 Blue Heron, 118 Bohr, Niels, 161 bosons, 163–4 Boyer, Herbert, 32–3, 83 BP, 181 Brenner, Sydney, 5, 21, 79 epigraph, 47 Briggs, Robert, 98 Brongniart, Adolphe-Théodore, 45 Brothers Grimm, 185 Brown, Robert, 45 Brownian motion, 45–6 Bucher, Nancy, 135 Butler, Samuel, epigraph, 83 Capecchi, Mario, 58 Caplan, Arthur, 79 Caruthers, Marvin, 61 Caulobacter crescentus, 145–6 Cech, Thomas, 132 Celera, 68 cells, 34–5, 40–1 cell-free systems, 131, 135–7, 148, 165 cellular life on Earth, 130, 132–4, 137 cooperation of, 136–8 death of, 44 discovery of, 15 and DNA, 145 E-Cell Project, 141–2 human shedding of, 41 ingredients of, 138 multicellular, 137–8 origin of, 132–4, 137 protein content of, 108, 138 Schrödinger on, 2 single-celled organisms, 57, 69 size of, 90 as structure of life, 15, 18, 35 transformed identity of, 109 virtual cells, 140–5 and vitalism, 17 waste disposal of, 43 See also synthetic cells censorship, 76–7 Chain, Ernst Boris, 170 Chargaff, Erwin, 29 Chase, Martha Cowles, 28 chemistry, 11, 132, 163 organic vs. inorganic, 11–2, 14–5 Chen, Irene, 133 Chin, Jason, 151 Cho, Mildred K., 79 cholera, 99–100 Crichton, Michael, 185 Jurassic Park, 82 Chuang, Ray-Yuan, 91 Church, George, 84, 152 Ciechanover, Aaron, 43 climate change, 155, 158–9 See also environment; temperature Clinton, Bill, 48 cloning: Dolly (the sheep), 80, 96–7 first animal clone, 98 transformation-associated recombination (TAR), 120 yeast, 93–4, 113–5, 118 code-script, 3–5, 20–1, 24–5, 129 Cohen, Stanley Norman, 32–3, 83 Collins, James J., 150 comparative genomics, 53–61 computers, 21 and artificial life, 23 and biology, 139, 145–6 and DNA sequencing, 50 foundation of, 19 and information, 139 and life, 22 and teleportation, 162 Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology (Pauly), 9 Covert, Markus W., 143 creativity, 111 Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, 43 Crichton, Michael, Timeline, 161 Crick, Francis, 4, 21, 28 on directed panspermia, 130 lab notebook at JCVI, 29 on RNA, 30 and Schrödinger, 5 Crucibles: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Chemists (Jaffe), 14 crystal: aperiodic, 3–5, 7, 26, 40 growth mechanisms, 57 See also X-ray crystallography Cybernetics (Weiner), 22 cystic fibrosis, 42–3 Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species, 16, 139 Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, 26 Dawkins, Richard, 5 definitions, 127 See also life, definition of Deinococcus radiodurans R1, 89–91 Delbrück, Max, 2, 69, 173 Descartes, René, Discourse on Method, 10 designer life, 10, 130–1, 139–45 bio-circuits, 147–8 brain simulation, 140 and genes, 145 virtual cells, 140–5 d’Herelle, Félix, 172–3 Diamond, Jared, 79 digestive system, 136 digitized-life-sending-unit, 177 Dirac, Paul, 163 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 10 DNA: and cells, 145 composition of, 28–9 digital, 163–4 digitized-life-sending-unit, 177 double helix structure of, 4, 21, 28–9, 45 electrical charge of, 104 forensic, 111 fragility of, 103 as genetic material, 4, 24, 26–31 half-life of, 182–3 junk, 40 lateral gene transfer, 171 ligase, 64 methylation, 114–5 Neanderthal, 87 polymerase, 64–5, 67 protein structured by, 46 recombinant, 32–3 situation of, 104 as software of life, 6–7, 34, 41, 46–7, 78, 96, 109, 125, 130, 147, 187 and teleportation, 163, 165, 176 DNA fingerprinting, 32 DNA sequencing, 36, 47–53, 67–8 accuracy of, 71–2, 86–8, 94, 119–21, 124 and computers, 50 expressed sequence tags (ESTs), 50–1, 67 of first living organism, 53 interstellar broadcasts, 187 on Mars, 186–7 at speed of light, 163, 187 watermark sequences, 88, 94 See also shotgun sequencing DNA splicing, 31–4 DNA synthesis, 6, 61–2, 84–5, 89, 92, 94, 116–7 difficulty of, 70 error rate, 164–5 and phages, 175 do-it-yourself, 155, 157 Doctor Who, 160 Dolly (cloned sheep), 80, 96–7 doomsday virus, 157 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 161 epigraph, 160 Driesch, Hans, 17 dust, household, 41 The Dynamics of Living Matter (Loeb), 8 Dyson, Freeman, 128, 155 Dyson, George, Turing’s Cathedral, 23 E-Cell Project, 141–2 E. coli, 84, 115, 145 Earth: cellular life on, 130, 132–4, 137 life on, 163 and Mars, 179–80 planetary protection, 184 The Economist, 56 Einstein, Albert, 45, 161 elastin, 35 electrophoresis, 108 electroporation, 74 Eli Lilly and Company, 33 Eliava, George, 173 Embryonic Development and Induction (Spemann & Mangold), 97 Empedocles, 9 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 65 Endy, Drew, 146, 152 Energy Department (DOE), 68, 75, 77, 151–2 entelechy, 17 environment, 78, 80, 157–9 natural, 155 See also climate change; temperature environmentalists, 128 epigenetics, 18 ethics, 151–9 five guiding principles, 156 New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies, 156 Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, 156 review board for synthetic life, 79, 151 and science, 80–2 Evans, Martin, 58 evolution, 53–4, 87 and chromosome acquisition, 100 designer life free of, 154 and genome transplantation, 100–1 experimental method, 34 expressed sequence tags (ESTs), 50–1, 67 extraterrestrial life, 56–7, 179–87 extremophiles, 57, 182 Fermi, Enrico, 163 fermions, 163–4 Feynman, Richard, 125, 127 epigraph, 111 Fiers, Walter, 48 Fire, Andrew, 40 Flavell, Richard, 67 Flemming, Alexander, 170 Florey, Howard Walter, 170 The Fly (Langelaan), 161 food, 33–4, 83, 157–9, 165 Fraenkel-Conrat, Heinz, 135 frameshift mutation, 121 Frankenstein (Shelley), 8, 12, 82, 156, 185 Franklin, Rosalind, 21, 29 Friedman, Robert, 151 gene knockouts, 58 Genentech, 33–4 genes: coding for, 40 concept of, 21 and context, 59 and designer life, 145 of influenza virus, 167 lateral gene transfer, 171 and life, 54–61, 80, 85 size of, 2 transplantation of, 99 unknown functions of, 56, 130, 146 genetic code, 36 as binary code, 3 first living organism sequenced, 53 and RNA, 132–4 genetic engineering, 32–4, 83–4, 111 crops, 33, 83 do-it-yourself, 155 first biotech product, 34 first transgenic animal, 32 toolkits for, 150 genetic mutations, 181 genetics: origin of, 26 reverse, 67 genome synthesis, 117 genome transplantation, 96–110 animal cloning, 96–8 and cell growth, 101–2 and evolution, 100–1 vs. gene transplantation, 99 mass spectrometry, 108–9 new methods, 103–5 questions about, 108 species change, 109 yeast trouble, 114–5 genomes: first decoding of, 48 first reading of, 5 metagenomics, 68–9 size of, 90, 92–3, 95, 102 See also comparative genomics; human genome; synthetic genome Gibson assembly, 117, 119 Gibson, Dan, 117–8, 120–2 Gibson, Everett, 56 Gilbert, Walter, 47 Glass, John I., 85, 101 God, 11, 24, 65, 82, 128, 158 Gosling, Raymond, 21, 29 Gould, Steven, Jumper, 161 Gram, Hans Christian, 53 Gram staining, 53 Griffith, Frederick, 27 Gurdon, John, 98 Gutmann, Amy, 156 Haemophilus influenzae, 51–5 Harry Potter (Rowling), 161 Healy, Bernadine, 76 Heatley, Norman, 170 Heliobacter pylori, 57 heredity, 3, 25–6, 28, 40 and nucleic acids, 28 d’Herelle, Félix, 172–3 Hershey, Alfred, 28, 173 Hershko, Avram, 43 history, 174 History of Chemistry (Kopp), 14 Holley, Robert W., 31, 48 Hood, Larry, 50 Hooke, Robert, 15, 130 Micrographia, 34 human genome, 48, 50, 68, 70 vs. microorganism, 90, 92–3, 95 and teleportation, 162–3 See also genomes human shedding, 41 humans, enhancement of, 158 Humulin, 34 Hutchison, Clyde, 49, 53, 59, 69–70, 74, 85, 113 industrial revolution, new, 177 influenza virus, 153 gene sequences of, 167 and vaccines, 166–70 information: and computers, 139 and life, 110, 124, 127, 129 and teleportation, 162 information science, biology as, 5 inheritance See heredity innovation, 111 The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), 50–1, 76 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM), 146–50, 154 internet, quantum, 162 Intralytix, 176 The Irish Times, 2 isomerism, 14 Itakura, Keiichi, 33 J.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

When thinking about Generation Z, we can talk only of what we think we know from projections: what trends are now well established, and what could happen to throw all this off course—climate change, war, famine, pestilence, disease, the usual suspects from the four horses of the apocalypse onward. The 1982 film Blade Runner imagines a dystopian, socially divided city in which the dominant imagery is East Asian. This imagery was used because at that time the United States had a collective fear of the economic rise of Japan. It would have been far more prescient had the imagery suggested an imagined future China. The 2017 sequel of the film was released to great acclaim, but it was a trope that was beginning to tire.

…

Only global temperature rises are still accelerating, and their peak could well lag behind other changes by many decades. In France, modern fertility peaked in 1963, the year in which “sex began” in England.24 Figure 42 shows the rapid deceleration from 2.9 children per woman then, to less than 1.9 when Blade Runner first hit cinema screens (2.1 would be needed at that time for stability). Numerous attempts by the French authorities to boost fertility only managed to nudge the total fertility rate over 2 for a very few years. In the past couple of years, it has hung in the balance, at 1.96, and it will soon almost certainly settle a little lower than that, given the current trends in so much of the rest of the world.

…

See also birth rates; infant mortality baby booms, 104–5, 143, 147, 165, 205, 309 Ballas, Roula and Vassilis, 16–18 Bangladesh, 165, 167, 168 Beaumont, Paul, 279 Beveridge, William, 185–86 Bézier curves, 33, 337 Bible, 65, 66, 73, 77, 288 biodiversity, 298–301, 300, 302, 304, 366n32. See also extinction birth rates, 307–13, 309; family-planning clinics and, 311–12; inequality and, 153; maternity leave and, 310–11; of teenage mothers, 313; women’s freedom to choose and, 312. See also fertility Black Death, 147, 174 Blade Runner, 214 Blaiklock, Katherine, 281 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 32 books, 72–85; European explosion in book publishing, 72–74; importance of, 80–81; increasing literacy and production of, 77; Netherlands production and consumption, 73, 74–77, 75, 81–85, 83; and obsolescence, 77–80, 81; oldest, 65 Booth, Charles, 186 boredom, 17–18, 322–23 Brazil: car production, 115, 118; fertility rates, 225, 228; slavery, 8 Bread, 287 Brexit, 279–80 Brexit Party, 281 Bricker, Darrell, 140, 141, 296 British Empire, 145, 279–80 British Isles: emigration from, 162; population, 161–65, 164.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Steven Kotler
Published 11 May 2015

Both of these vehicles are currently for sale; neither of them have actually been delivered to a customer. And that’s really the issue. Out of the 104 roadable aircraft (80 of which have patents on file), none have seen mass production. There are, of course, good reasons for this. While the upside of a flying car is easy to imagine — no traffic jams, shorter commutes, another excuse to quote Blade Runner — the downsides are considerable. Cost and noise, for starters (at $196,000, the Terrafugia has already been branded a rich man’s toy, to say nothing of Moller’s $3.5 million reserve price). Safety and ease-of-use are bigger stumbling blocks. As with anything that flies, the consequences of pilot error can be severe.

…

Molnar, on the other hand, has built a machine that can fly high enough to clear tall mountains and drive fast enough to give Formula One racers a run for their money. And it’s here today. Molnar, in fact, is about to take it on a cross-country trip. A few years from now, you’ll be able to assemble one from a kit and do the same. It is both the stuff of very old dreams and the very first flying vehicle that’s actually available to the masses. So get your Blade Runner quotes ready. Meltdown or Mother Lode THE POSSIBILITIES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY Nuclear fusion, the energy released when two atoms collide, is gods’ fire, both the fuel that powers the stars and the all-star light in “Let there be light.” Nuclear fission, meanwhile, is the energy released when an atom is subdivided.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Even the exceptions to this rule, the still-creative portions of pop cinema, are often tethered to the boomer era. When big-screen science fiction isn’t just a straight-up eighties-vintage franchise movie—a Star Wars or Star Trek or Alien or Predator—it’s usually a strange multilayered exercise in recursion, like Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049, which trades on a peculiar nostalgia for an eighties dystopia that’s tellingly more technologically proficient than our own, or Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, in which the hero’s journey of the future takes place inside a virtual world built from the pop culture that the youthful Spielberg helped create.

…

H., 13, 157 Augustus, emperor of Rome, 200, 201 austerity, 33 Australia, birthrate in, 50 authoritarianism, 12, 49, 86, 162–63, 195, 199, 201, 218 soft, see pink police state sustainable decadence and, 137–54 Trump and, 80, 130 Autor, David, 29 Aztec Empire, 189–90 baby boom, 54–55 baby boomers: creative tension between previous generation and, 109–10 cultural impact of, 108–9 repetition and, 109, 111–12 utopianism of, 109 Back to the Future (film), 89–90 “Back to the Future” Day, 89 Back to the Future Part II (film), 89 Baffler, 37 Baldwin, James, 97 Balkans, civil wars in, 134 Bannon, Steve, 132–33 Barzun, Jacques, 8, 12, 69, 91, 96, 100, 113, 135, 172, 184 Baudrillard, Jean, 135 Bellah, Robert, 97, 101 Belloc, Hilaire, 178 Ben-Abbes, Mohammed (char.), 155, 156, 160 Bentham, Jeremy, 144 Bernanke, Ben, 84 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 165 Between the World and Me (Coates), 97 Bezos, Jeff, 213 bipartisanship, 68, 76–77, 82, 171 birthrates, 202 in Africa, 197, 198, 207 of American Jews, 222 in Israel, 50, 54, 217 birthrates, decline in, 27, 46, 47–65, 166–67, 180, 236 contributing factors in, 50–56 in dystopian fiction of Atwood and James, 47–50 economic consequences of, 56–58 innovation and, 57–58 in Islamic world, 161 mass immigration as solution to economic problems of, 62–65 psychological consequences of, 61–62 recessions and, 51 replacement rate and, 50, 53–54, 58, 63 shrinking families and, 58–62 welfare states and, 51, 52 Black Death, 190 Black Panther (film), 209–10 Blade Runner: 2049 (film), 94 Bloom, Allan, 97 Bloom, Harold, 224 Bloomberg, Michael, 143 Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 43 Bork, Robert, 78 brain drain, 171 Brave New World (Huxley), 127–28, 151, 184–85 Brazil, economic growth in, 166–67 Brexit, 63, 64, 85, 114, 172, 193 Great Recession and, 193 immigration and, 196 Brookings Institution, 71 Brown, Peter, 223 Brown, Scott, 67 Buckley, William F., 97 Buddhism, 225 Bundy, Ted, 119, 120 Bush, George H.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Contrary to prevalent stereotypes about online users at the time, 40 percent of its subscribers were women (granted, it was, to the dismay of Horn, very white). While conversations were broadly cultural, about all kinds of film, books, and music, community favorites tended to skew toward the cyber-introspective and science fictional, like Blade Runner and Neal Stephenson. “Everybody in the early days had at least some part geek to them,” Horn told me. * * * Echo was clever and communal in threads, where users were constantly joking, but conversations also accessed a depth of intimacy that Horn compares to “group therapy.” Someone might have created a “conference” with a subject like “Tell me about your mother,” and scores of responses would accumulate, in great detail, expressing trauma and pain; users would share their stories and sympathy throughout the week.

…

Their identities were in character as culture icons, fictional characters, even concepts (“War”), locations (“Broadway”), and things to eat. Friendster, despite minimal community involvement, routinely pruned these accounts. “Roy Batty,” a user who presented himself as the persona of the replicant in Blade Runner, posted a manifesto to his bulletin board, urging the Friendster founder to see it differently. “Identity is provisional,” he explained: Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament, or subjective need. No other person or organization can abridge that right, as shape-shifting is inherent to human consciousness, and allows us to thrive and survive under greatly differing circumstances by becoming different people as need or desire arises.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

The latter offer dazed humans the chance to plug into virtual-reality dreamscapes to escape the treadmill of their lives, while small bands of rebels attempt to resist. If it sometimes feels as though dystopian science fiction has inspired technology companies, it is because we already see its plot lines manifesting in real-world innovations brought to us by Big Tech: from Minority Report’s ubiquitous facial-recognition technology and Blade Runner’s biotechnology through to Snow Crash’s ‘Gargoyles’ – individuals rigged up with devices that feed audio-visual data into a virtual reality version of the Internet called the ‘Metaverse’. But nobody needs to be ‘inspired’ by science fiction for its plot lines to play out: cyberpunk was simply extrapolating from trends that were already inherent within large-scale capitalist systems, which is why the results continue to turn up in our present, as if governed by inertia.

…

Aadhar system, 44, 97, 169 abacuses, 159 ‘Abracadabra’, 50 accelerators, 17 active choice, 125 Acxiom, 109 Adventures of a Banknote, The (Bridges), 65 Aesop, 45–6 AirBnB, 150 Alameda, California, 102 alcohol, 102, 118, 170 Alexa, 147, 150 Alibaba, 2, 7, 114, 150, 178 Alipay, 114 Alphabet, see Google alt-coins, 13, 217–18 Althusser, Louis, 86 Amazon, 1, 2, 7, 133, 147, 149, 150, 174, 177, 249–50 Alexa, 147, 150 anti-cash lobbying, 41–2, 254 CBDCs and, 243, 244 Coin, 236 Pay, 150 Amazon region, 130, 176, 247, 249 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 60 Ames Research Center, 153 Amnesty International, 222 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 128–9 Amy, 147 anarchism, 7, 14, 106, 183, 191, 193, 215 anarcho-capitalism, 14, 184 Andes, 96, 129 anthropology, 124 anti-feminism, 226 anti-Semitism, 225, 262 anti-statism, 42, 184, 215–16 antidotes, 52–4 Apollo 11 mission (1969), 153 Apple, 7, 125 apps and, 141 Card, 150 data, 108 Pay, 78, 125, 130 Super Bowl advert (1984), 8 apps, 1, 2, 7, 17, 27, 40, 125, 139–51, 232 data collection, 165–6 interfaces, 139–51 ArcelorMittal, 24 Aria, 169 Armer, Paul, 105–6 Art of Not Being Governed, The (Scott), 228 artificial intelligence (AI), 8, 11, 17, 108, 114, 147, 153–72, 175, 252 biases, 167 credit-scoring, 17, 160, 162–3, 167, 168, 170 data analysis, 108, 153–72 interfaces, 146–8 Asimov, Isaac, 161, 170 Assange, Julian, 183 Assemblage, New York City, 226 Astana, Kazakhstan, 227–9 Athens, Greece, 131 ATMs (automatic teller machines), 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 48, 61, 62, 248 CIT industry, 62 closure of, 32, 39, 48, 83, 84, 85, 132 crises and, 36, 244 note denominations, 62 profitability, 39 Atwood, Margaret, 117 austerity, 193 Australia, 118 Austria, 7, 109 authoritarianism, 111, 118, 168 automatic payments, 149 automation, 9, 10, 33, 41–2, 99, 123, 126, 133, 137, 142–3, 232 apps, 139–51, 232 artificial intelligence, 153–72 automation of, 153–4 surveillance, 112, 114, 153–72 aviaries, 171 Azure cloud, 233 Back to the Future (1985 film), 198 Baidu, 7, 178 Bangladesh, 32 Bank for International Settlements, 79 Bank Identification Codes (BIC), 76 Bank of America, 38, 75, 147 Bank of England, 40, 242, 243 banking sector, 38–9, 65–82 accounts, 31, 35, 46, 66, 132, 205–6 artificial intelligence, 153–72 ATMs, see ATMs bailouts, 113 centralisation of power, 15, 180–83 closures of ATMs/branches, 32, 39, 48, 83, 84, 85, 132 cloudmoney, 64, 66–82 data, 108–9, 156–7 deposits, 66–7, 69 electronic trading platforms, 158 exiting, 39, 48, 61, 63, 68, 83 federated frontline, 136–8, 147 high-street banks, 39–40, 158 interbank markets, 138, 231 interfaces, 138–51 international transfers, 74–6, 108, 179 Internet banking, 76–7, 139 investment banks, 6, 17, 22–3, 26, 113, 157–8 loans, 70–71, 107, 159 money creation, 59–63, 67–72, 202 operating system, 141–2 secondary system, 50, 63–4 sub-currencies, 72–3 transfers, 72–8 banknotes, 59–63 cash-in-transit companies, 62 counterfeiting of, 60–61 denominations, 62 polymer, 65 Bannon, Steve, 225, 234 Barclays, 38, 72–3, 116 base money, 69 beggars, 115 Better Than Cash Alliance, 34–5, 37, 45, 93, 96, 131 biases, 167 bicycles, 89, 90 Big Bouncers, 114, 170 Big Brother, 113–15 Big Butlers, 114, 170–71 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 44–5 biometrics, 44, 150, 169 biotechnology, 10, 11 Bitcoin, 13–15, 16, 184–5, 187–210, 211–18 blockchain technology, 13–15, 185, 189–90, 195, 197–202 Cash fork (2017), 214, 217 climate change and, 226 as commodity, 206–10, 213–14, 217, 246, 256 countertradability, 209–10, 213, 256–7 decentralisation, 14, 15, 189–94, 196, 258 fixed supply, 191–3, 206 gold comparison, 192–3, 207, 214 millenarianism and, 212, 213 mining, 203–4, 212–13 politics and, 191–3, 211–12, 215–17 proof-of-work, 203–4 public addresses, 194–5 speculation on, 213 syncing, 195–7, 200–202, 231 techno-clerks, 194–5, 196–7, 202–4, 212–13 wallets, 194–5 White Paper (2008), 13, 184–5, 187, 191 Bitcoin Cash, 214–15, 217, 226 Bitcoin Gospel, The (2015 film), 211 Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film), 10 blockchain, 13–15, 185, 189–90, 195, 197–202, 219–26, 258–60 decentralisation, 14, 15, 189–94, 196, 230, 234, 255, 258–60 distributed ledger technology (DLT), 229–46, 258 mutual credit systems and, 260 blood diamonds, 222 Bloomberg, 109 Body of Glass (Piercy), 150 BP, 24, 26, 28 bread-making machine, 164 Bridges, Thomas, 65 British Airways, 29–30 British Bankers Association, 83 Brixton Market, London, 177 Bulgaria, 13 Bundesbank, 35, 47 bureaucracy, 179 Burning Man, 101 busking, 90–91 Buterin, Vitalik, 221, 223 California Ideology, 180 Camberwell, London, 128 Cambridge Symposium on Economic Crime, 111 Cambridge University, 97 Canada, 35 Canary Wharf, London, 17–18, 20, 41, 62, 211 cannabis, 101–3 capitalism, 2, 10, 47, 65, 98–9, 173–4 blockchain and, 15–16, 231–46, 256, 258 charging up, 22–5 core vs. periphery, 28, 248 giant parable, 54–5, 63–4, 188 growth, 123, 126–7, 249 surveillance, 33, 114, 180, 250 carbon credits, 222 CARE, 131 cargo cults, 255–6 Caritas, 131 carnivals, 257 cars, 87–90 cash, 22, 29–48 banking sector and, see banking sector banknotes, 59–63 central banks and, 42–5, 254 crime and, 36, 42–3, 45, 81, 112 crises and, 36, 61 cycle, 63, 68 demonetisations, 43 fintech industry and, 41–2 hoarding, 36 issuance of, 59–63 libertarians and, 215 payments companies and, 39–41 refusal of, 29–30, 40, 41, 43, 84, 128, 133 social class and, 91–9 tax evasion and, 42, 43, 45, 46 thresholds, 42 transactional usage, 36 cash-in-transit companies, 62 ‘cash or card?’

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

The Matrix imagines humanity enslaved by thinking machines which have supplanted them. Battlestar Galactica imagines humans and human-like machines, the Cylons, and the complex relationship between the two – the latter nearly destroy humanity before realising they are more like their ‘parents’ than they might hope. Blade Runner, too, explored humanity’s difficult relationship with technology. These works of fiction all share various traits. Most obviously, they picture humanity facing off against artificial intelligence that closely resembles humanity: it can communicate with us, it often looks like us, and it is a sophisticated multi-cellular organism capable of abstract thought, which makes deliberate plans.

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Trilogy, Constable & Robinson, London, 1975 Sunstein, Cass R., Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2014 Walker, Jesse, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, Harper Perennial, London, 2012 Index Abedin, Huma, here Adler, Daniel, here Alefantis, James, here, here Alexander, Leigh, here Ali, Rashid, here alt-right, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here AlternativeRight.com, here Amazon, here, here American Revolution, here Anonymous, here, here, here, here, here anthrax, here Anti-Defamation League, here, here Antifa, here, here, here, here, here, here anti-vaccination movement, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Arab Spring, here, here Archer, here Arcuri, Jennifer, here Argentino, Marc-André, here ARPANET, here Arzaga, Ashley Noell, here Assange, Julian, here, here Astley, Rick, here AT&T, here, here ‘auditing’, here Aung San Suu Kyi, here Babbage, Charles, here Bannon, Steve, here, here Battlestar Galactica, here Beck, Glenn, here Beech, Carl (‘Nick’), here Berners-Lee, Tim, here Biden, Hunter, here Biden, Joe, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Big Energy, here Big Pharma, here, here Big Tobacco, here Bilderberg, here bin Laden, Osama, here ‘birther’ conspiracy, here Black Lives Matter, here, here, here, here, here Blade Runner, here blood libel, here, here Boebert, Lauren, here, here, here Bolsonaro, Jair, here Bonet, Lisa, here Boy’s Club, here Brand, Russell, here Brandenburg, Steven, here Breitbart, here, here, here Brennan, Frederick, here, here Brexit, here, here Brown, Dan, here, here BTS, here Bureau of Investigative Journalism, here Burisma, here Bush, George W., here Butler, Samuel, here Butter, Michael, here ‘cabal’, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and child abuse, here, here, here, here, here Fall of the Cabal, here Caldwell, Thomas, here Californian wildfires, here Capitol Hill riot, here, here, here, here Carlson, Tucker, here, here Carrey, Jim, here Carusone, Angelo, here Catholic Church, here, here, here Charlottesville rally, here Chaucer, Geoffrey, here chemtrails, here, here, here child abuse and trafficking, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and repressed memories, here ‘ritual abuse’, here, here, here chiropractic medicine, here Christchurch shooting, here, here Church of Scientology, here, here, here, here, here, here CIA, here, here, here, here Cicada3301, here, here Clark, Clay, here climate denial, here Clinton, Bill, here, here, here, here Clinton, Hillary, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cloudflare, here cognitive dissonance, here, here, here Cohen, Michael, here Coleman, Gabriella, here, here, here Coleman, John, here Coleman, Matthew Taylor, here, here Collins, Ben, here, here, here Comello, Anthony, here Comet Ping Pong, here, here, here, here Conservative Party, here, here Conway, Kellyanne, here Corbyn, Piers, here, here Covid-19 pandemic, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Covid-19: The Great Reset, here, here lockdowns, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and rise of QAnon, here, here see also anti-vaccination movement CrossFit, here Cruise, Tom, here ‘crumbs’, here Current Affairs, here Damsel in Distress, here Dartmouth College, here Darwin, Charles, here Davis, Lucy, here Davison, Jake, here, here Davos, here, here Dawkins, Richard, here, here, here DC convoy, here Democratic National Committee (DNC), here, here Democrats, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Depression Quest, here Diaz, Tracy, here, here Didulo, Romana, here Discord, here, here Disney, here Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), here Djokovic, Novak, here Dominion technology company, here Dorsey, Jack, here doxing, here, here, here, here, here Duplessis, Samara, here East India Company, here Ebner, Julia, here Ebola, here, here 8chan, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here El Paso shooting, here Epoch Times, here Epstein, Jeffrey, here, here, here, here, here Ever Given, here Facebook, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here algorithm and radicalisation, here fact-checking, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Fauci, Anthony, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here FBI, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here feminism, here Festinger, Leon, here Fields, James Alex, here financial crash (2007–8), here Finding Q, here 5G, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, here Flynn, Michael, here, here, here ‘following the white rabbit’, here, here, here 4chan, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here anonymity principle, here cult of Kek, here number of users, here and presidential election, here Fox News, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here framing, here Freedom For The Children UK, here Freemasons, here Furber, Paul, here, here, here, here Furie, Matt, here Futuba Channel, here Gaetz, Matt, here Gaia website, here Galvez, Israel, here GamaSutra, here Gamergate, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gates, Bill, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gates Foundation, here Gawker, here Gen Z, here gilets jaunes protests, here Giuliani, Rudy, here globalism, here Goldwater, Barry, here Graham, Tom, here Grayson, Nathan, here ‘Great Reset’, here, here, here, here Green Day, here Greene, Marjorie Taylor, here, here, here GRU, here Guardian, here, here, here Habbo Hotel, here, here, here Haberman, Maggie, here Hallett, Christopher, here Hanks, Tom, here Harris, Kamala, here Haugen, Frances, here Herbert, Frank, here Heyer, Heather, here hijab-wearing, here Hildmann, Attila, here Hitler, Adolf, here HIV/AIDS, here, here, here Holland, Joshua, here Holocaust, here, here Homeland Security, here, here homeopathy, here homophobia, here, here, here, here, here Hoover Dam siege, here, here Hubbard, L.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
by Henry Jenkins
Published 31 Jul 2006

Such a work becomes more reward- was updated each day, filling in the gaps between the aired episodes. A t its peak ing when we watch it on D V D , stopping popularity, the site was drawing 25 and starting to absorb the background. million page views per week. As Pike Some fans trace these tendencies back to explained, Blade Runner (1982), where urbanologist We considered our episodes to be a Syd M e a d was asked to construct the f u seven day arc starting one minute after the show ended Inevitably Dawson's ture metropolis on the recognizable founCreek would end on a cliffhanger of dations of existing Los Angeles. These a r o u n d t h e w o H d 33 some kind, we would expand on it, Skenovâno pro studijni ucely I 16 Searching f o r the O r i g a m i U n i c o r n tackle it, address some of the elements fans would be calling each other and discussing.

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Skenovano pro studijni ucely Searching f o r the O r i g a m i U n i c o r n 123 Additive Comprehension If creators do not ultimately control what we take from their transme¬ dia stories, this does not prevent them from trying to shape our interpretations. N e i l Young talks about "additive comprehension." H e cites the example of the director's cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited v i e w ers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: "That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending. . . . The challenge for us, especially w i t h The Lord of the Rings, is h o w do we deliver the origami unicorn, h o w do we deliver that one piece of information that makes y o u look at the films differently."

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, 148 activism, 12 adbusting, 137 additive comprehension, 123, 125-128 adhocracies, 251, 254, 256-257 Adventures in Odyssey, 200 advertising, 7,12, 20, 22, 66 Advertising Age, 67-68 Aeon Flux, 101 affective economics, 20, 61-64, 70,126 affinity spaces, 177-180,183-185, 259 A i n ' t It C o o l N e w s , 55 Akira, 110 Albrecht, Chris, 138-139,149,154-155 Alice in Wonderland, 99 Alien, 114 A l Jazeera, 78 A l i a s , Marcia, 249 Alliance Talent Agency, 70 Almereyda, Michael, 151-152 A l p h a v i l l e , 228-232 Alphaville Herald, 229-231 alternate reality games, 124-127, 233 A m a z o n . c o m , 132, 200 American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, 196 A m e r i c a n Express, 69 American Idol, 19-20, 59-61, 63-64, 68, 70-71, 76-92,155 American Idol (personalities): C l a y A i k e n , 71, 84, 86, 89; Fantasia Barrino 91; Simon C o w e l l , 87-88, 90; Elton John, 91; Kimberley Locke, 84; Ruben Studdard, 71, 84-86, 89, 91 America Online, 229 America's Army, 74-79, 207 America's Funniest Home Videos, 142 amusement parks, 96 A n d e r s o n , C h r i s , 252 anime, 100-101,156-161 A n i m e Angels, 201 Annenberg Public P o l i c y Center, 225, 227 Antonucci, M i k e , 104 A O L , 86 A p p l e Box Productions, 64 A p p l e Computers, 79 A p p l e M u s i c Store, 253 Apprentice, The, 69-72, 84, 206-207 apprenticeship, 29, 238 appropriation, 18,148-149, 246 A r m s , P h i l , 192 Arrested Development, 253-254 Artificial Intelligence: A.I., 123,127 A s k w i t h , Ivan, 104, 253 assessment, 85 Associated Press, 213 astral projection, 193 A T & T Wireless, 59, 87-89, 91-92 A t o m F i l m s , 131,139, 149,154-156 295 Skenovâno pro studijni ücely 296 Index Babylon 5,117 Bagge, Peter, 93-94, 97, 101 banner ads, 65 Barnes & N o b l e , 110 Barney, Matthew, 129 Bartle, Richard, 160 Batman: Hong Kong, 111 Baudrillard, Jean, 98-99 Baynes, Arthur, 228 BBC, 242 Bear Steams, 71 "Beast," The, 123-125,127, 232 Being Digital, 5 Ben & Jerry's Ice C r e a m , 206 Benedek, Peter, 239 Benjamin, Walter, 223, 226 Benning, Sadie, 151 Berlant, Lauren, 222 Bert (Sesame Street), 1 Bertelsmann M e d i a W o r l d w i d e , 108 brand advocates, 73 brand communities, 79-80, 83, 88, 91, 216 brand extension, 69 brand tests, 79 branding, 20, 62-64, 68-72, 76, 91 brand loyalty, 72 brands, 22 Broadcasting & Cable, 89 Brock, Jack, 192 Brooker, W i l l , 151 Bruce Almighty, 200 Buckingham, D a v i d , 128, 227-228 B u d d h a , 98 Burnett, M a r k , 25, 32, 37, 42-43, 46^18, 51, 56, 69, 90, 215, 251 Burton, T i m , 115 Bush, George W., 206-207, 211-212, 216, 219, 221, 223, 230, 234 " B u s h i n 30 seconds" contest, 219-220 Business Week, 66 "Bert is E v i l , " 1-3 beta reading, 179-181 Bible, 122,193, 204 Big Brother, 51-53,109 Billboard, 61 Bilson, Danny, 97,105-106,123 Bin Laden, Osama, 221 Bioware, 162-164 BitTorrent, 251 Black Box Fallacy, 14-16, 24, 212 Black, Rebecca, 181 Blade Runner, 115,123 Blair Witch Project, The, 97,101-103, 115,119 bloggers/blogging/blogs, 212-218, 237, 241, 252 blue A m e r i c a , 235, 237, 239 B M W , 207 Bochco, Stephen, 116 Bollinger, D a n , 32-34, 51, 57 Bollywood, 4 Borders, 110 Boston, 45 brain d r a i n , 38 brain trusts, 38-40, cable television, 66 C a m p a i g n 2004, 22, 29, 208-239, 246 C a m p b e l l , Joseph, 98,120 Carey, M a r i a h , 61 Carlson, Tucker, 225, 227 Cartoon N e t w o r k , 132 Casablanca, 97-98,101 Cassidy, K y l e , 149 Castells, M a n u e l , 129 casuals, 74, 76-77, 81 CBS, 25, 36-37, 45-46, 48, 54, 57, 60, 211-213, 220, 225 cease-and-desist, 152,186,189 Celebrity Deathmatch, 148 Center for Deliberative Democracy, 235 Center for Information and Research on C i v i c Learning and Engagement, 223 C h a d w i c k , Paul, 101,111-113,125, 128 C h a n C h e n , 113 C h a n , E v a n , 124 C h a n , Jackie, 109 Skenováno pro studijní ucely Index Charlie's Angels, 108 cheating, 259 Cheney, Richard, 219, 230 Cheskin Research, 15 C h i c k - f i l - A , 200 Children's Television Workshop, 2 chilling effects.org, 188 ChillOne, 26, 28, 31-32, 34-35, 37, 39-40, 42-46, 48-51, 54-57 China, 108,110,112-113 Chomsky, N o a m , 247 C h o w Yun-Fat, 113 Christian Gamers G u i l d , 201 Christianity, 21-22, 98,100,119, 169-171,192-195,197-204 Christopher Little Literary Agency, 185 C h u n g , Peter, 101 Ciao Bella, 70 citizen, informed vs. monitorial, 208, 225-226, 258-259 citizen journalists, 240 Clarkson, Kelly, 61 "click through," 65 Clinton, W i l l i a m J., 219 Cloudmakers, 123,125,127, 232 C N N , 1-3,124,140,192, 225 Coca-Cola Company, 60, 68-69, 70, 73, 87-88, 91, 92, 207 co-creation, 105-107 code, 163 Cohen, Ben, 206 cokemusic.com, 72 Cold Mountain, 200 Cole, Jeanne, 150 collaborationism, 134,167, 169-170, 187 collaborative authorship, 96,108¬ 113 Collective Detective, 233 collective intelligence, 2, 4, 20, 22, 26-27, 29, 50, 52-54, 63, 95,100, 127, 129,170,184, 208, 226, 235, 245-247, 254 Colson, Charles, 201-202 Columbine, 192 C o m e d y Central, 224-225 comics, 14, 96,101-102,108-109, 111, 132,164, 249-250 commercial culture, 135 commodity, 27 commodity exploitation, 62-63 communal media, 245 Comparative M e d i a Studies program, 12, 68, 80, 85,151 complexity, 33, 94-95, 259 Concepción, Bienvenido, 143 Concrete, 101, 111 consensus, 86 consensus culture, 236 convergence, 2-8,10-12, 14-24, 26, 59, 64, 68, 83, 95,104,114,170, 208, 212, 220, 242 convergence, corporate, 18,109-110, 157, 259 convergence culture, 15, 21, 23,132, 137,176-177, 204, 212, 242, 247, 259-260, 248, 257 convergence, grassroots, 18, 57, 109-110, 136-137, 157, 215, 259 Coombe, Rosemary J., 189 Coors Brewing Company, 69 Cops, 132 copyright, 137-138,154,167,189-190, 248 Corliss, Richard, 127 "cosplay," 113-114 Counterstrike, 163 Cowboy Bebop, 101 Creative Artists Agency, 60, 67 Crest toothpaste, 70 critical pessimism, 247-248 critical utopianism, 247-248 Crossfire, 225 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 109, 112-113 cult films, 97-98 cultural activator, 95 cultural attractor, 95 culture.

Frommer's Los Angeles 2010
by Matthew Richard Poole
Published 28 Sep 2009

When y ou’re str olling thr ough these grand historic halls, it ’s easy to imagine the glamor ous mo vie stars who once 2 boarded The C ity of Los A ngeles and The Super Chief to journey back East during the glory days of rail trav el; it ’s also easy to picture the many heartfelt reunions between returning soldiers and loved ones following the end of World War II, in the station ’s heyday. Movies shot here include Bugsy, The Way We Were, and Blade Runner. Designed b y r enowned ar chitect I. M. Pei, US B ank Tower (also kno wn as Library Tower) is L.A. ’s most distinctiv e skyscraper (it’s the r ound one) and is the tallest building between Chicago and Singapore. B uilt in 1989 at a cost of $450 million, the 76-stor y monolith is both square and rectangular, rising from its 5th Street base in a series of overlapping spirals and cubes.

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The glass cr own at the top—illuminated at night—is the highest building helipad in the world. WATTS Watts became notorious as the site of riots in the summer of 1965, during LO S A N G E L E S I N D E P T H ART & ARCHITECTURE of the 19th centur y. The glass-topped atrium is often used as a movie and TV set; you’ve pr obably seen it befor e in Chinatown and Blade Runner. The Cathedral of O ur Lady of the Angels, completed in September 2002 at a cost of $163 million and built to last 500 years, is one of L.A. ’s newest architectural treasures and the third-largest cathedral in the world. I t was designed b y award-winning Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo and featur es a 20,000-squar e-foot plaza with a meditation gar den, mor e than 6,000 cr ypts and niches (making it the largest cr ypt mausoleum in the U.S.), mission-style colonnades, biblically inspired gardens, and numerous artworks.

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Capped b y a magical fiv e-story skylight, Bradbury’s cour tyard combines glaz ed brick, ornate M exican tile floors, rich B elgian marble, Ar t N ouveau grillwor k, handsome oak paneling, and lacelike wr ought-iron railings—it’s one of the great interior spaces of the 19th century. The glass-topped atrium is often used as a mo vie and TV set; y ou’ve probably seen it befor e in Chinatown and Blade Runner. W H AT TO S E E & D O I N LO S A N G E L E S 1962 Glencoe Way (off Hillcrest Rd., near Highland and Franklin aves.). & 323/851-0671. W H AT TO S E E & D O I N LO S A N G E L E S 184 ARCHITECTURAL HIGHLIGHTS 7 Moments Divine Vibrations Every Wednesday from 12:45 to 1:15pm, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels—the city’s $163-million architectural jewel—hosts an organ recital that is open to the public and free of charge.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg
Published 8 Dec 2015

We have explored the possibilities for a very different approach to robots, but something inside us still longs for a modern version of those old mechanical humanoid automata, whether they are electromechanically based like Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation or biological, like the replicants in Blade Runner. Is that ever going to happen? It seems likely that we will continue to have demonstration robots like ASIMO that have increasingly sophisticated capabilities, but personally I suspect we won’t see human robots or androids in everyday life. For the mechanical versions, this is in part because of the “I, Robot effect”—the fact that such inhuman humanoids would tend to creep us out—and in part because of the much more interesting possibilities from hives of mini-robots as described above.

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See also particle gun; phaser; ray guns Archimedes as inventor of light and mirrors in projectile compared to SF use of “Beep” (Blish) Bell, Alexander Graham Bell, Jocelyn Bell Aircraft Corporation Bell Labs laser development by speech recognition and de Bergerac, Cyrano Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (BLEEX) The Bionic Woman Blade Runner BLEEX. See Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton Blish, James AI governments by instantaneous transmitter by virtual learning and Borg (fictional characters) Bose-Einstein condensate Bostrom, Nick The Boys from Brazil (Levin) Bradbury, Ray brain to brain link to computer link electrodes in implants interface to programming BrainGate Brownian motion Brunner, John Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Campbell, John W.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

Black marketeering, drugs trafficking, prostitution — and the entertainment business, which technology has made ubiquitous and powerful. These are the economic options open to most. Almost nobody has anything resembling a job. The driving ethic is escapism rather than work. It is December 1999. It could be any vaguely futuristic film from Blade Runner to Strange Days or a William Gibson novel. As the songwriter Leonard Cohen puts it more succinctly: ‘Get ready for the Future. It is murder.’ Although the American vein of paranoia about the state has to be treated as a special case, the product of its history, the image of a not-too-distant future in which order has decayed and most of us will lead a dangerous and feral economic existence is resonant throughout the industrial world.

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For information technology is reducing the domain over which governments and corporate bodies have any control. It is restricting the ability of governments to raise taxes, and of companies to protect their ideas. The industrial West will be forced to develop a new social contract that accepts technical realities, as explored in the next chapter — or perhaps those grim Blade Runner or Black Rain dystopias will come true. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. See, for example, The Pension Time Bomb in Europe, Federal Trust, 1995. The Future of Savings and Wealth Accumulation, by David Miles, Merrill Lynch, September 1996. Caring for Frail, Elderly People, 1996. In Can We Afford To Grow Older, 1996.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Famous for his special effects in the “Star Gate” rebirth sequence at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, he had abandoned Hollywood and exiled himself to a small Massachusetts town, where he nursed suspicions of conspiratorial resistance to his analog genius. After his triumph in 2001, Trumbull provided special effects for several other landmark films, including Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. But the world had gone digital, and Trumbull was nearly forgotten. Now in the early 90s he was attempting rebirth as the inventor of an immersive seventy-millimeter, sixty-frames-per-second film process called Showscan and a 3D ride-film. The result was an experience we now call “virtual reality.”

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Brian, 1 artificial intelligence (AI), 2–4, 7, 20–21, 41–42, 66, 72–73, 89, 94–101, 104, 106–8, 191–92 Asilomar, 93–99, 105–7 Assange, Julian, 131 AT&T, 229, 233–35 Atlas Shrugged, 123 Attention Merchants, The, 235 Ayau, Manuel, 213–16 Ayre, Calvin, 146 B Back to the Future, xi–xii, xiv, 70 Bagehot, Walter, 88 Baird, Leemon, 150, 245, 266–67 Balaban, Stephen, 117, 189–98, 223–24 Baroque Cycle, 11 Battlestar Galactica, 5 Baum, Leonard E., 77, 80, 90 Beasley, Cole, 272 Bechtolsheim, Andy, 26, 59–60 Belch, Danny, 274 Bell, Gordon, 53–54, 61, 198, 202, 231, 268 Benet, Juan, 204 Berners-Lee, Tim, 164, 168 Berninger, Daniel, 227–31, 233, 235–36 Bezos, Jeff, 26 Bharara, Preet, 145, 244 Bitcoin Magazine, 107, 110, 152 Bitcoin Standard, The, 154, 253 bitcoins, 110, 120, 124, 126–27, 133, 145–46, 216–18, 252, 257, 279 Blade Runner, xii blockchain, 106–8, 110–11, 129–30, 139, 141, 146–57, 165, 169, 171–76, 184–85, 202–4, 206–11, 217–18, 223–24, 227–28, 231–32, 234, 239–41, 243–47, 255, 258–61, 263–66, 268–69, 277, 279, 281–83, 285 Blockstack, 121, 159–60, 164–65, 169, 172–76, 201–2, 247, 260, 263, 265 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 18, 76, 280 Bostrom, Nick, 7, 93 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 18, 76, 280 Bowyer, Jerry, 37 Bradley, Bill, 110 Bradski, Gary, 191, 194 Brin, Sergey, xv, 4, 7, 25–27, 29–31, 33, 37, 54, 59, 90, 181 Brodsky, Ira, 35 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 93 Buckley, William F., 6 Buffett, Warren, 125, 243 Burning Man, 32–34, 95, 193 Buterin, Vitalik, 106–8, 110–13, 117, 150–54, 156–57, 169, 184, 192, 203, 220, 223–25, 244, 258, 264 C Calzada, Gabriel, 216 Canizaro, Frank, 68 Carmack, John, 185 Carnap, Rudolf, 15–16 Casado, Martin, 161–62, 165 Chaitin, Gregory, 18–19, 73–874, 247, 277, 280 Chalmers, David, 93 Chandna, Asheem, 5 Chaun Li, 197 Cheriton, Dave, 26 China National Petroleum, 11 Christensen, Clayton, 114, 259 Church, Alonzo, 190, 247 Clark, Jim, 166 Clarkson, Steve, 197 Cleland, Scott, 35 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, xii Coase, Ronald, 9 Coase’s Law, 259 Cohen, Bram, 132, Computer and the Brain, The, 70 Cook, Tim, 4, 29 Cortana, 64 cryptocosm, 43, 45–46, 50, 108, 131, 202, 210, 243, 245, 264, 266, 269 cryptography, 107, 202, 217, 259, 268, 282, 284 Cybernetics, 77 D Dalles, The, 51–54, 56, 58, 61, 69, 82, 195, 199 Dally, Bill, 26, 63–65, 67–72, 195, 209–10 Darwin, Charles, 7, 46, 115 Dawn of the New Everything, 272 Dean, Jeff, 41, 67, 69 Deep Mind, 3, 41, 94 de Grey, Aubrey, 4 Demeester, Tuur, 216, 218 Denton, Michael, 106 Dick, Philip K., 193 Dimon, Jamie, 125, 243 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

There is Frank Gehry’s concert hall downtown, a wonderful construction of curved steel intended to look something like a ship. There is the Getty Center, high up on the hills of Brentwood, overlooking the city. There is the Bradbury Building, a late Victorian wonder of ornate iron walkways featured in the final scenes of Blade Runner. And then there are any number of grand, modernist palaces of the sort that dot the Santa Monica seafront or rise up into the hills of the Pacific Palisades. And yet, for many architects at least, the characteristic building of Los Angeles is none of these. It is in fact a far humbler building, known as the “dingbat.”

…

Yet when I emerged from the train station in Shibuya, blinking jetlagged in the morning light after a night flight from Amsterdam, what actually caught me off guard was not the bustle but rather how quiet the city is. When you see cliched images of Tokyo, what invariably is shown are the enormous crowds of pedestrians crossing the roads, or Mount Fuji in the background of the futuristic skyline. I expected something like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, I suppose—futuristic and overwhelming. From photos, Tokyo can look almost unplanned, with neon signs everywhere and a huge variety of forms of architecture. You expect it to feel messy. What I experienced, however, was a city that felt almost like being in a futuristic village. It is utterly calm, in a way that is actually rather strange.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

AI with a working memory, able to apply something learned in one context to use in another, has been demonstrated at Deep-Mind. Complex reasoning is one of the things that humans can do as a matter of course. It means we can respond correctly when we are presented with statements such as ‘Replicants are afraid of Blade Runners. Rachael is a replicant. What is Rachael afraid of?’ Or we can look at the London Underground map and tell someone how to get from Old Street to Putney. It’s something that computers have had trouble with, but which DeepMind is starting to tackle with a neural network-style computer that has access to a short-term memory.12 It’s a small step towards human-like thinking, and it’s this sort of success that encourages DeepMind that the neural network approach is the route to get there.

…

If an AI can do all these things to a high level – planning, using short-term memory, predicting what its actions might do, understanding the motivations of others, being creative – and it seems reasonable to think that we will eventually develop such a machine – then who cares if it ‘experiences’ the smell of coffee or the colour of a rose? Its common sense, derived from its deep-learning algorithms, might be effectively as unquantifiable as ours. In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard, a bounty hunter known as a Blade Runner, interviews Rachael, a woman who may or may not be an artificial human. During the interview, he measures her physiological reactions. ‘You are given a calf-skin wallet on your birthday.’ ‘I wouldn’t accept it,’ Rachael said. ‘Also I’d report the person who gave it to me to the police.’ Deckard tries again, telling her about a time in the barbaric past when people cooked lobsters by dropping them live into boiling water.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, not any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent, say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner, or, more recently, Transformers. But the bottom line is this: most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

While the Experience Music Project next door has the guitars used by Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley, and Kurt Cobain, the Science Fiction Museum rocks just as hard. Displayed in the museum are such artifacts as Captain Kirk’s command chair from Star Trek, the alien queen from Aliens, Darth Vader’s helmet from The Empire Strikes Back, Neal Stephenson’s handwritten manuscript for the Baroque Cycle trilogy, and the pistol used by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. The museum also runs a kids’ program, including a “summer camp on Mars,” as well as a happy hour for the adults, with three-dollar beers on tap. It is easy to think of the Museum and Hall of Fame as only some sort of “Pantheon of Nerds” (what my editor jokingly called it), as science fiction may well be the ultimate of geekdom.

…

This preparation extends beyond future expectations; science fiction creates a frame of reference that shapes our hopes and fears about the future, as well as how we reflect on the ethics of some new technology. One set of human rights experts I queried on the laws of unmanned warfare referenced Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Robocop with the same weight as they did the Geneva Conventions. At another human rights organization, two leaders even got into a debate over whether the combat scenes in Star Trek were realistic; their idea was that this could help determine whether the fictional codes of the Federation could be used as real-world guides for today’s tough ethical choices in war.

…

For example, the laws of war deal not only with the treatment of civilians, but also that of fellow soldiers, banning torture and mandating that captured soldiers be treated well. So, as Robert Finkelstein asks about robots, “If they are given human level intelligence, will they be treated as humans? Why not?” Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch equally muses, “Will we ever get to the point where Human Rights Watch is advocating in a Blade Runner scenario, where Human Rights Watch is standing up for a manufactured human machine? Does that mean Human Rights Watch becomes Human and Robotics Rights Watch?” There are two arguments for how and why we might start to care about how robots are treated, even in war. Interestingly, both aspects of robot rights are less about the robots themselves and more about the humans involved.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

But things end reductively, with claims that a robot “knows” how to form attachments because it has the algorithms. The dream of today’s roboticists is no less than to reverse engineer love. Are we indifferent to whether we are loved by robots or by our own kind? In Philip K. Dick’s classic science fiction story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (which most people know through its film adaptation, Blade Runner ), loving and being loved by a robot seems a good thing. The film’s hero, Deckard, is a professional robot hunter in a world where humans and robots look and sound alike. He falls in love with Rachel, an android programmed with human memories and the knowledge that she will “die.” I have argued that knowledge of mortality and an experience of the life cycle are what make us uniquely human.

…

By the end of the film, we are left to wonder whether Deckard himself may be an android but unaware of his identity. Unable to resolve this question, we cheer for Deckard and Rachel as they escape to whatever time they have remaining—in other words, to the human condition. Decades after the film’s release, we are still nowhere near developing its androids. But to me, the message of Blade Runner speaks to our current circumstance: long before we have devices that can pass any version of the Turing test, the test will seem beside the point. We will not care if our machines are clever but whether they love us. Indeed, roboticists want us to know that the point of affective machines is that they will take care of us.

…

.: Artificial Intelligence (film) AIBO aggression toward categorizing gives way to everyday routines care by, fantasies of creature and machine, views of it as caring for companion, role as “feelings” attributed to “growing up,” appearance of playing with projection and teaching it, experience of Alcott, Louisa May Aldiss, Brian “Alive enough,” as milestone for digital creatures Aliveness, children’s theories of Alterity, robots and Alzheimer’s disease, and robotic companions America Online Anger, as way of relating to robots Anthropomorphism, robots and Anxiety, online life, as provoking “of always,” privacy and Apologies confessions and online Appiah, Kwame Anthony Apple Artificial intelligence (AI) limits in understanding Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT) Artificial life Aryananda, Lijin Asperger’s syndrome, robots and Attention, children’s desire for continual partial Authenticity, robotic companionship and illusion of, in social network profiles online life and Autism, robots and “Avatar of me,” Facebook profile as Avatars building relationships among Babysitters consideration of robots as Baird, Freedom Beatles: Rock Band Behaviorism, of robotic moment Bell, Gordon Bentham, Jeremy Bio Bugs (toy), robots and BIT (Baby IT) BlackBerry and sense of control excluding others and turning off Blade Runner (film) Blogs and the loss of the particular Bohr, Niels Boundaries, sense of personal, technology and Breakups face-to-face online Breazeal, Cynthia Brooks, Rodney Buber, Martin Bullying, online Bush, Vannevar Caper, Robert Caretakers, ideas about robots as Caring for a robot performance of substitutes for “Caring machines,” development of Cell phones (smartphones) and autonomy, development of people as “pausable” and avoiding calls and demands of documenting life using sense of emergency and identity (as collaborative) and photographs and private time on, desire for safety (feeling of), and turning off Chat logs “Chat people,” Chat rooms Chatroulette, playing Chess, computers and Churchill, Winston Civilization (game) Coach, robot as Cog seeking “affection” from building demystifying of meeting relationships, range of, with talking to teaching Cold comforts, robots as source of Collaborative self Collection, recollection and Columbine Communication (digital) in abbreviations (emoticons) versus connection choice among genres and nostalgia for letters volume and velocity of and simplification of responses from substitution to preference for hiding as affordance of and “discontents,” Community confessional sites and seeking Companionship, confusions in digital culture Complicity, with robot Computer psychotherapy, attitudes toward Computers as evocative object holding power of as mechanical and spiritual (soul in the) subjective versus instrumental as caring machines and cyborg self Connectivity and global consciousness and new symptoms of connection/disconnection Confessional sites, online apologies and communities, contrast to critical comments about and discussion of abuse reading, experience of as symptoms and venting cruelty of strangers and Connections on backchannels during meetings communication versus constant disconnection and online power of stepping back from, desire to seductions of Connectivity anxiety worries of parents culture discontents of global reach of robots merged with Conversations beginning/ending face-to-face online private robots and text messages as Crocodiles, real and robotic Csíkszentmihalyi, Mihaly Cubism, as metaphor for simultaneous vision of robot as machine and creature Communications culture, digital characteristics of cyborg sensibility and “dumbing down,” (emotional) in “networked” sensibility, characteristics of Walden images in sacred spaces and Damasio, Antonio Darwin, Charles “Darwinian Buttons,” eye contact track motion gesture in encounter with Cog De Vaucanson, Jacques Dean, Howard Death, simulation and Deep Thought (computer program) Democracy, privacy and Dertouzos, Michael Dick, Philip K.

The Signal: Watch Out for the Darkness
by Nick Cook
Published 11 Jul 2018

Graham whistled. ‘An AI venturing between parallel worlds, now that really is an astounding thought.’ ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ Steve said. ‘Pardon?’ Kiera said. But I knew exactly what Steve was saying and it was actually a film quote. ‘It’s a speech by the replicant Batty from Blade Runner.’ Kiera shook her head. ‘Right, and your point being, Steve?’ ‘That we need to start thinking of this code as something alive.’ ‘I agree,’ I said. ‘And if so we should give it a name.’ ‘Well, the only English word we’ve seen so far is Sentinel, so let’s run with that,’ Steve said. Kiera shrugged.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

As one expert who has worked in the field for a quarter of a century put it, ‘in 2017, there is not a single level three automated Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere vehicle being sold in the marketplace today’.31 The technology is currently hovering around Level 2 and Level 3, although the secrecy surrounding much of the development and the hype around information that is released to the public means it is difficult to get accurate information. There is, therefore, a long way to go. This public relations effort from the auto manufacturers is necessary to justify the vast amounts they are spending on developing the technology but it presents a fantasy that is more Blade Runner 2049 than News at Ten. The top five manufacturers spent $46 billion on R&D in 2015: an 8 per cent increase year on year. While it is not possible to disentangle precisely the proportion of that huge sum being spent on electric and autonomous car technology, according to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report on connectivity cited in the last chapter, ‘the self-driving car will be the most valuable contribution to automakers’ top and bottom lines in a generation’.32 Therefore, it is highly likely that much of this money is being spent on the search for the Holy Grail of the self-driving car, and the actual sums mentioned by various companies back this up.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

Consider how we already treat them when we are exposed to them as characters in stories and movies: R2D2 from the Star Wars movies, David and Teddy from the movie A.I., Data from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Johnny 5 from the movie Short Circuit, WALL-E from Disney’s movie Wall-E, T-800—the (good) Terminator—in the second and later Terminator movies, Rachael the Replicant from the movie Blade Runner (who, by the way, is not aware that she is not human), Bumblebee from the movie, TV, and comic series Transformers, and Sonny from the movie I, Robot. We do empathize with these characters even though we know that they are nonbiological. We regard them as conscious persons, just as we do biological human characters.

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(film), 210 Aiken, Howard, 189 Alexander, Richard D., 224 algorithms, intelligent, 6–7 Allen, Paul, 266–72 Allman, John M., 179 Alzheimer’s disease, 102 amygdala, 71, 77, 106–8, 109 analog processing, digital emulation of, 194–95, 274 Analytical Engine, 189–90 anesthesia awareness, 206 animal behavior, evolution of, 122 apical dendrites, 110 aptitude, 111–12 artificial intelligence (AI), 7, 37–38, 50, 265, 280 Allen on, 270–71 biological models for, 273 chess playing and, 6, 38–39, 165–66, 257 conversation and, 168–69 as extension of neocortex, 172, 276 knowledge bases and, 4, 6–7, 170–71, 246, 247 language and speech processing in, 72–73, 92, 115–16, 122–23, 128, 135–41, 142–46, 145, 149–50, 152–53, 156, 157–72 medicine and, 6–7, 39, 108, 156, 160–61, 168 omnipresence of, 158 optimization of pattern recognition in, 112 sparse coding in, 95–96 see also neocortex, digital Audience, Inc., 96–97, 98 auditory association, 77 auditory cortex, 7, 77, 97, 128 auditory information processing, 96–97, 97 auditory nerve, 97, 128 data reduction in, 138 auditory pathway, 97 autoassociation, 59–61, 133, 173 automobiles, self-driving, 7, 159, 261, 274 axons, 36, 42, 43, 66, 67, 90, 100, 113, 150, 173 as digital processors, 191 Babbage, Charles, 189–90 Bainbridge, David, 179 bandwidth, of Internet, 254 basis functions, 103–4 Bedny, Marina, 87 Bell System Technical Journal, 184 Berger, Theodore, 102 Berners-Lee, Tim, 172 Bernoulli’s principle, 5, 8 Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker), 27 Bierce, Ambrose, 66 BINAC, 189 Bing, 171 biology, 37 DNA as unifying theory of, 17 reverse-engineering of, 4–5 biomedicine, LOAR and, 251, 252, 253 Blackmore, Susan, 211 Blade Runner (film), 210 Blakeslee, Sandra, 73, 156 Blue Brain Project, 63, 80, 124–28, 125 Bombe, 187 Bostrom, Nick, 129–30, 222 Boyden, Ed, 126 brain, evolution of, 2 brain, human: analog computing in, 274 complexity of, 8–9, 181, 272 digital implants in, 243–44 digital neocortex as extension of, 172, 276 hemispheres of, 77, 224–49 LOAR as applied to, 261–63, 263, 264, 265 prediction by, 250 redundancy of, 9 reverse-engineering of, see brain, human, computer emulation of; neocortex, digital structure of, 77 brain, human, computer emulation of, 5, 7, 179–98, 273, 280 invariance and, 197 memory requirements of, 196–97 parallel processing in, 197 processing speed in, 195–96 redundancy in, 197 singularity and, 194 Turing test and, 159–60, 169, 170, 178, 191, 213, 214, 233, 276, 298n von Neumann on, 191–95 see also neocortex, digital brain, mammalian: hierarchical thinking as unique to, 2–3, 35 neocortex in, 78, 93, 286n brain plasticity, 79, 87–89, 91, 182, 193, 197, 225, 280 as evidence of universal neocortical processing, 86, 88, 152 limitations on, 88–89 brain scanning, 7, 263, 308n destructive, 264, 265, 309n–11n LOAR and, 262–63, 263, 264, 265 nondestructive, 127, 129, 264, 312n–13n noninvasive, 273 Venn diagram of, 262 brain simulations, 124–31, 262 brain stem, 36, 99 Bremermann, Hans, 316n Britain, Battle of, 187 Brodsky, Joseph, 199 Burns, Eric A., 113 busy beaver problem, 207 Butler, Samuel, 62, 199–200, 224, 248–49 Byron, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 190, 191 California, University of, at Berkeley, 88 “CALO” project, 162 carbon atoms, information structures based on, 2 Carroll, Lewis, 109 cells, replacement of, 245, 246 cellular automata, 236–39 cerebellum, 7, 77, 103–4 uniform structure of, 103 cerebral cortex, 7–8 see also neocortex Chalmers, David, 201–2, 218, 241 “chatbots,” 161 chemistry, 37 chess, AI systems and, 6, 38–39, 165–66, 257 chimpanzees: language and, 3, 41 tool use by, 41 “Chinese room” thought experiment, 170, 274–75 Chomsky, Noam, 56, 158 Church, Alonzo, 186 Church-Turing thesis, 186 civil rights, 278 cloud computing, 116–17, 123, 246, 279–80 cochlea, 96, 97, 135, 138 cochlear implants, 243 Cockburn, David, 214 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 129 Colossus, 187, 188 “common sense,” 40 communication, reliability of, 182–85, 190 communication technology, LOAR and, 253, 254 compatibilism, 234 complexity, 198, 233 of human brain, 8–9, 181, 272 modeling and, 37–38 true vs. apparent, 10–11 computation: price/performance of, 4–5, 250–51, 257, 257, 267–68, 301n–3n thinking compared with to, 26–27 universality of, 26, 181–82, 185, 188, 192, 207 Computer and the Brain, The (von Neumann), 191 computers: brain emulated by, see brain, human, computer emulation of consciousness and, 209–11, 213–15, 223 intelligent algorithms employed by, 6–7 knowledge base expanded by, 4, 246, 247 logic gates in, 185 memory in, 185, 259, 260, 268, 301n–3n, 306n–7n reliability of communication by, 182–85, 190 see also neocortex, digital “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), 191 conditionals, 65, 69, 153, 189, 190 confabulation, 70, 217, 227, 228, 229 connectionism, 133, 191 “connectome,” 262 consciousness, 11, 199–209 cerebral hemispheres and, 226–29 computers and, 209–11, 213–15, 223, 233 Descartes on, 221–22 dualist views of, 202–3 Eastern vs.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg
Published 5 Apr 2011

Trilobyte was being groomed by Wall Street to be the next gold-mine initial public offering. Microsoft, Disney, and Fox representatives pulled up in fancy cars, thinking seriously about investing in the company or offering Devine and Landeros lucrative gigs. They proposed a Clive Barker horror game, a Blade Runner game, and an X-Files game. Trilobyte passed every time. Some analysts, who valued the company at more than $50 million, said Trilobyte was on its way to becoming a company more massive than Sega, with more reach than Nintendo. Two million sold? That was nothing, they said. The next game would do Super Mario Bros. numbers.

…

Sony never made that particular version of the PlayStation, and Nintendo didn’t make a CD-ROM drive for the SNES, either. Ultimately, the partnership was a failure, probably because the two companies were too competitive to work together in anything that resembled harmony. But Kutaragi soldiered on. He had a dream to make videogames look as good as one of his favorite movies, Blade Runner. Through a combination of yelling, screaming, and nose-to-the-grindstone hard work, Ken Kutaragi had fought tooth and nail to get his PlayStation up and running in Japan. Though early on Sony as a corporation did not really see the potential for a game machine, Kutaragi continued to evangelize.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

But the expected arrival date has been receding at the rate of about one year per year. Accordingly, many futurists still put the arrival date of machine general intelligence equivalent to humans 20 years into the future.26 The Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which depicted a dystopian future in which artificial life forms beat humans in both strength and intelligence, appeared in 1982. A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, appeared in 2017, again depicting a similar dystopian future. Robots disappoint Meanwhile, in the real world, the performance of robots has disappointed early hopes. You could be forgiven for thinking that they appeared on the scene only recently.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
Published 14 Apr 2020

Other firms’ purchases of all-American icons, such as Mitsubishi’s acquisition of Rockefeller Center and Nintendo’s of the Seattle Mariners baseball team, stoked simmering tensions into an incandescent rage. American firms did everything they could to fuel it. “Imagine a few years from now,” cheerily invited a 1990 ad for General Motors. “It’s December and the whole family is going to go see the big tree in Hirohito Center!” Popular entertainment offered no escape. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Blade Runner, portrayed a crumbling American landscape framed in triumphant Japanese neon, with Coca-Cola being quaffed by coquettish geisha. William Gibson went on to write Neuromancer, a 1984 novel set in a near-future dystopia dominated by Japanese megacorporations. It won the Nebula Award and turned a generation on to the pleasures of the emerging genre of cyberpunk.

…

And so it was that the superfans went back underground for years. The new anime century would have to wait. But it was coming, whether the critics of the otaku wanted it or not. * * * — WHAT WAS IT about the year 2019 that so enchanted the fantasy-makers of the eighties? Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi epic Blade Runner is set in 2019. And who could forget the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man, centered around the preposterous premise of a reality TV star launching a political revolution. So too was 2019 the setting for a 1988 animated film from Japan that would profoundly affect the global fantasyscape.

The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming
by Kees Doets , Jan van Eijck and Jan Eijck
Published 15 Jan 2004

SETS, TYPES AND LISTS 146 module DB where type WordList = [String] type DB = [WordList] db :: DB db = [ ["release", ["release", ["release", ["release", ["release", ["release", ["release", {- ... -} ["direct", ["direct", ["direct", ["direct", ["direct", ["direct", ["direct", ["direct", {- ... -} "Blade Runner", "1982"], "Alien", "1979"], "Titanic", "1997"], "Good Will Hunting", "1997"], "Pulp Fiction", "1994"], "Reservoir Dogs", "1992"], "Romeo and Juliet", "1996"], "Brian De Palma", "The Untouchables"], "James Cameron", "Titanic"], "James Cameron", "Aliens"], "Ridley Scott", "Alien"], "Ridley Scott", "Blade Runner"], "Ridley Scott", "Thelma and Louise"], "Gus Van Sant", "Good Will Hunting"], "Quentin Tarantino", "Pulp Fiction"], ["play", "Leonardo DiCaprio", "Romeo and Juliet", "Romeo"], ["play", "Leonardo DiCaprio", "Titanic", "Jack Dawson"], ["play", "Robin Williams", "Good Will Hunting", "Sean McGuire"], ["play", "John Travolta", "Pulp Fiction", "Vincent Vega"], ["play", "Harvey Keitel", "Reservoir Dogs", "Mr White"], ["play", "Harvey Keitel", "Pulp Fiction", "Winston Wolf"], ["play", "Uma Thurman", "Pulp Fiction", "Mia"], ["play", "Quentin Tarantino", "Pulp Fiction", "Jimmie"], ["play", "Quentin Tarantino", "Reservoir Dogs", "Mr Brown"], ["play", "Sigourney Weaver", "Alien", "Ellen Ripley"], {- ... -} Figure 4.6: A Database Module. 4.7.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

But Gorz’s point is that it is this that also deeply penetrates to the very core of daily life by way of the instruments we daily use to live that life, including all those we handle in our work. There is, evidently, a deep longing in popular culture to somehow humanise the impacts of this barren culture of technology. We see that in the way that the replicants in Blade Runner acquire feelings, how Sonmi-451 learns an expressive language in Cloud Atlas, how the robots in Wall-E learn to care and shed a tear while human beings, bloated with compensatory consumer goods, passively float alone, each on their separate magic carpet, above the ruinous world the robots are seeking to order below; and even, more negatively, how HAL the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey goes rogue.

…

N., Process and Reality, New York, Free Press, 1969 Wolff, R., Moore, B., and Marcuse, H., A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Beyond Tolerance, Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook, Repressive Tolerance, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 Wright, M., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

Having played it safe with the Model Y, he did not want that to happen with the design of the pickup truck. “Let’s be bold,” he said. “Let’s surprise people.” Every time someone would point to a picture that was more conventional, Musk would push back and point to the car from the video game Halo or in the trailer for the forthcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 or from Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner. His son Saxon, who is autistic, had recently asked an offbeat question that resonated: “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?” Musk would quote Saxon’s question repeatedly. As he said to the design team that Friday, “I want the future to look like the future.” There were a few dissenting voices suggesting that something too futuristic would not sell.

…

“I think the Mars simulation is fun,” he finally interjected, “but we should do one that shows the robots working in one of our factories, maybe performing the repetitive tasks that no one wants to do.” At another meeting they discussed whether they could put an Optimus in the driver’s seat of a Robotaxi to meet the legal requirements of a car needing a driver. “Do you remember the original Blade Runner movie did something like that,” Musk said. “Also the most recent Cyberpunk game.” He liked taking the fiction out of science fiction. Other ideas seemed more influenced by the silly side of Musk’s limbic system. “Maybe we should have the charger cord plug into the butt,” he joked at one point.

…

See Tesla Autopilot project Babuschkin, Igor, 605 Babylon Bee, 419, 527, 529, 554 Baglino, Drew, 195 Autopilot project and, 246, 247 Model S and, 199 Optimus and, 498 Robotaxi and, 501, 502 Straubel departure and, 302, 303 Baker, Jim, 571 Balajadia, Jehn, 362, 513 Bankman-Fried, Sam, 460–61 Banks, Azealia, 308–9 Banks, Iain, 400 Bannon, Pete, 396 Bard, 601 Barenholtz, Jeremy, 497, 561, 562–63 Barra, Mary, 421 Bassett, Natasha, 7, 265, 451, 491 Battle of Polytopia, The, 46 Bauch, Matt, 597 Beal Aerospace, 115 Beeple, 448–49 Belsky, Scott, 520 Benioff, Marc, 430 Berland, Leslie, 465, 508, 534 Bernstein, Carl, 573 Beykpour, Kayvon, 520 Bezos, Jeff, 223, 353 Amazon HQ and, 336 competition with SpaceX, 226, 227–28, 231–32, 233–34, 354 competition with Starlink, 355–56 Inspiration4 mission and, 385 love of space travel, 224–25 management style, 166, 354–55 space tourism and, 353, 356, 383, 476 Trump and, 261 Washington Post purchase, 357 wealth of, 408 Bhattacharya, Jay, 573, 578 Biden, Hunter, 567, 577, 579 Biden, Joe, and administration, 420–23, 535, 567 Binder, Matt, 576 Birchall, Jared Austin home plans and, 473 EM’s demon mode and, 539 EM’s management of Twitter and, 543 EM’s politics and, 419, 443 Kimbal’s restaurant business and, 300–301 philanthropy and, 439 Twitter acquisition and, 442, 451, 452–53, 464, 490, 494, 512 Twitter board invitation and, 445 Blade Runner, 318, 485 Blastar, 29, 33, 425 Blue Origin, 224, 226, 227–28, 233–34, 354, 355 board games. See strategy games Boeing, 101, 113, 123, 187, 206, 348, 350 See also Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance Bolden, Charlie, 206 Bolsonaro, Jair, 419 Boring Company, The, 257–59, 288, 298, 441, 472, 496, 585 Boston Dynamics, 394 Botha, Roelof, 75, 82, 86 Boucher, Claire.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future
by Laurence C. Smith
Published 22 Sep 2010

Custom-grown body parts? A hydrogen economy? As any disappointed sci-fi buff will tell you, the pace of reality is usually slower than human imagination. Fans of George Orwell’s book 1984, the television series Lost in Space and Space 1999, the films 2001: A Space Odyssey, and (it’s looking like) Blade Runner—set in a perpetually raining 2019 Los Angeles—see their landmark years come and go. But outside of the ongoing technical explosions in information and biotechnologies, our lives are considerably less different than the writers of these fictional works imagined they would be. We’ve discovered quarks and flung people into space, yet still depend on the internal combustion engine.

…

The same process Some World Aging Patterns by 2050 (median age, in years) (Source: United Nations Population Division) is now under way in developing countries, where fertility drops beginning in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s will unleash successive waves of aging over the planet for the next forty years. In his 1982 film Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott imagined that my home city of Los Angeles would be filled up with Japanese people by the year 2019. In light of Japan’s economic might at the time, it’s not hard to see where the idea came from. But Mr. Scott should have consulted a demographer, because I just don’t see where all those Japanese settlers will come from.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

In part, this was because Japanese culture felt exotic and symbolized the strangeness of the new world we were discovering in our labs. Walking in the blazing night of Shinjuku felt like what a virtual world might be someday. There was a lot of Japanese flavor in early cyberpunk, especially from William Gibson and in Blade Runner. But also, the Japanese adored virtual reality. There were great early VR labs all over the country, and it was amazing to visit them. Henry Fuchs and I used to have a classification scheme for VR research—single person or multiperson, augmented or not, haptic or not, and so on—and we could find no way around having a separate category for “strange experiments from Japan.”

…

artificial legs artificial reality artificial retinas artists art journals arts of memory Ascension ASCII Asimov, Isaac Astounding magazine asynchronous architectures Atari Atkinson, Bill Atoms for Peace attention augmented reality authoritarianism autism autocracy avant-garde art avatars patents and term coined usable weird Averch-Johnson effect ayahuasca baby boomers Bach, Johann Sebastian Toccata and Fugue in D minor Bailenson, Jeremy Bajcsy, Ruzena banking, online Bannon, Steve Barber, Samuel Adago for Strings Barlow, John Perry Barrow, Isaac Basic Income Model (BIM) Bateson, Gregory Bechet, Sidney Beethoven, Ludwig van behavior, online behavioral medicine behaviorism Bell Labs Berlin restoration plan Berners-Lee, Tim Bernstein, Leonard bicycle metaphor Biggs, E. Power biological motion Bishop, Bob bits defined people vs. bit slice chip black hats black holes Blade Runner (film) Blanchard, Chuck blind spot blind people Bly, Robert Body Electric Boeing Bolas, Mark Bosch, Hieronymus The Garden of Earthly Delights Bostrom, Nick Bower, Jim brain brain surgery brainwashing Brakhage, Stan Brand, Stewart Brave New World (Huxley) Brazil Bricken, William brittleness Brockman, John Brooks, Fred Brosnan, Pierce Brown University browser Bryson, Steve Buber, Martin Buchla, Don Buddhism bugs, xiv-xv bullies Burning Man Festival Burroughs, William business culture business model, Internet and busking butler strategy buttons Cage, John California Caltech camera Campbell, Joseph capitalism Carlsbad Caverns cars self-driving Carse, James P.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

Indeed, something quite similar is already being done, although under another name: gene therapy intended to deal with illnesses such as cystic fibrosis is in fact a type of genetic modification, although admittedly one that is not passed from parent to offspring. But extending gene therapy to germ cells, to stop the disease being passed on, is under discussion. … jokers to the right? A scene in Blade Runner, a film that asks Shelleyesque questions about the nature of humanity, is set in the headquarters of a prosperous-looking biotechnology company. The firm makes “replicants”, robots that look like humans, and the firm’s boss describes how they are grown from a single cell. The replicants, it is plain, are genetically modified people without any legal rights.

…

Kearney 163, 189 AAAI see American Association of Artificial Intelligence ABB 287, 289 ABI Research 295, 296 Accenture 39, 118–20, 126, 129, 131–2, 134–5, 138, 145–6 ActivCard 69 Activision 186–7 Adobe 39 Advanced Cell Technology 268 Africa 251–2 agricultural biotechnology ix, 238–9, 251–7, 270–1 see also genetic modifications AI see artificial intelligence AIBO 332, 334, 338 AIDS 247, 250 airlines 37–8, 42 AirPort 211 airport approach, security issues 68–9 Airvana 140–1 Alahuhta, Matti 164 Albert 339–40 “always on” IT prospects 94–5, 203 Amazon.com 10, 37, 91 AMD 85, 313 American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 337–8 American Express 22, 27, 126 American football 194–7 American Superconductor 288 amino acids 241–8, 253–5 analogues see late adopters Anderson, Roger 287 Anderson, Ross 61, 73–4, 76 Andreessen, Marc 8, 15 animal husbandry 256–7 anti-piracy systems 34–5 anti-virus software 50–1, 60, 67–8 antibodies 249–50, 256–7 AOL 93 Apache 10 Apple 95, 97, 99–101, 165–6, 172, 192, 198, 202–3, 204, 207–8, 211, 219–29 Applera 242–3 application service providers (ASPs) 19–20, 91–2, 109 Applied Molecular Evolution 246, 258 architects, green buildings 299–304 Archos AV 206 Argentina 319 Arima 156 Armand, Michel 281, 283 ARPU see average revenue per user Arthur, Brian 39 artificial intelligence (AI) x, 89, 102, 233, 336–40 artists 83–4 ASCII 96 Asian cultures 93, 142, 176 see also individual countries ASPs see application service providers AstraZeneca 312 AT&T 108, 110 ATMs see automated teller machines atoms, nanotechnology ix–x, 233, 263–4, 306–29 Atos Origin 123, 130, 134, 143 audits 44, 46 automated teller machines (ATMs) 61 autonomic computing 88–92, 335, 339 Avax office building 304 average revenue per user (ARPU), mobile phones 157, 162–3 B B2B see business-to-business computing Baan 30 Babic, Vasa 159 back-up systems 43–4 Bacon, Sir Francis 236, 271 Ballard, Geoffrey 290 Balliet, Marvin 28 Ballmer, Steve 98 Bamford, Peter 164–5, 167 banks 37, 42, 48, 61, 72, 80, 87, 115, 116–18, 121, 126, 146 Bardhan, Ashok 138 barriers to entry, mobile phones 155–6 Battat, Randy 140–1 batteries 233, 277–9, 280–4 Baumholtz, Sara 103, 105–6 Bayesian decision-making 338 BEA 21–2, 87 Bell 108 Bell, Genevieve 93 Bell, Gordon 13 Bell Labs 210 341 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY Benioff, Marc 19, 22, 84, 92 Benjamin, Dan 295 BenQ 156–7 Berliner, Emile 82 Bernstein, Phillip 300, 304 Berquist, Tom 37 Bhattacharya, Arindam 131 Bhide, Amar 128 Big Brother 179–83 biological weapons 265–6 biometric systems 60, 64–5, 71, 74 biopolymers 259–64 biotechnology ix–x, 233, 236–71 agricultural biotechnology ix, 238–9, 251–7, 270–1 categorisations 238–9, 241 cloning 239, 256, 267–71, 329 clusters 240 concepts ix–x, 233, 236–71, 327 embryonic stem cells 268–9 enzymes 258–64 fuels ix–x, 233, 259–64, 271, 274–9, 314–15 funding problems 237–8 future prospects 236–48, 267–71 genomics 239, 241–8, 262–4, 308 GM ix–x, 233, 236–40, 251–5, 267–71, 318–20 historical background 241 industrial biotechnology 258–64 medical applications ix–x, 145, 233, 236–40, 247, 249–50, 256–7, 267–71 pharmaceutical companies 239–40, 241–50, 312 plastics 238–9, 259–64 problems 236–40 revenue streams 237–8, 241–2 RNA molecules 241–2, 249–50, 265 therapeutic antibodies 249–50, 256–7 virtual tissue 248 warfare 265–6 x-ray crystallography 247–8 BlackBerry e-mail device 152–3, 156, 171 Blade Runner (movie) 269 Bloomberg, Jason 91 Bluetooth wireless links 171–2, 173, 214–15, 218 BMG 222–3, 227, 229 BMW 159, 176 Boeing 69 Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) 287 boom-and-bust cycles, innovations vii–viii, 4–39, 82–3, 107, 134 Bosch 142 Boston Consulting Group 120, 131, 140, 142, 160, 203, 226 Bowie, David 19 Brazil 114, 309, 319 BREEAM standard 300–1 342 Breese, Jack 100, 102 Brenner, Sydney 242, 252–3 Brillian 112–14 Brin, David 179, 183 Brin, Sergey 9 British Airways 126–7 broadband ix, 34–5, 52–3, 93, 96–7, 103, 168–9, 203, 207, 209–13 Broockman, Eric 216 Brooke, Lindsay 297 Brown, Tim 101, 106 Buddhism 19 budgets 7, 9, 14, 28–31, 45–6, 71, 186 bugs, software 20–1, 54–6 built-in obsolescence 8–9, 29 Bull, Michael 220 Bush, George W. 35, 144, 268–9, 274–6 Business Engine 28, 30 business models ix, 10, 19–20, 36–40, 109 business plans 10 business units 28–31 business-process outsourcing (BPO) 118 business-to-business computing (B2B) 90 Byrnes, Chris 44, 46 byte’s-eye view, complexity problems 85–7 C Calderone, Tom 224 call centres 79, 121, 125–9, 136, 144 Cambridge University 61, 73, 76 camcorders 214 camera phones 156, 170–2, 179–83, 203 see also mobile phones Cameron, Bobby 28 Canada 152, 181, 290 cancer cells 249–50, 317, 329 canola 252–3 Canon 108 capitalism 28 Capossela, Chris 79, 94 car industry 5, 38–9, 82–4, 113, 114, 116, 118–19, 120–1, 134, 146, 158–9, 175–6, 284, 290–8 diesel cars 296–7, 314–15 electric cars 284, 290, 291–8 hybrid cars 233, 284, 291–8 mobile phones 158–9, 175–6 particulate filters 296–7 performance issues 291–8 Toyota hybrid cars 291–5, 297 CARB 296 carbon nanotubes 311–12, 322, 325, 328 carbon-dioxide emissions 275, 296, 300 Cargill 253–4, 259–60 Carnegie Mellon 44–5 Carr, David 194 Carr, Nicholas vii–viii, 83 Cato Institute 34 INDEX CBS 36, 225 CDMA2000-1XEV-DO technology 165, 168–9 CDs 207, 212–13, 223–8, 315 celebrity customers, mobile phones 173–4 Celera 241–2, 262 Cell chips 198–200 cell phones 172 see also mobile phones Celltech 243 Centrino 11 Cenzic 54, 68 CFOs see chief financial officers Chand, Rajeev 217–18 Chapter 11 bankruptcies 37 Charles, Prince of Wales 317 Charney, Scott 43, 47, 72–3 Chase, Stuart 136, 139 Chasm Group 12, 36 Check Point Software 52–3, 86 chemistry 239, 310–11 Chi Mei 156–7 chief financial officers (CFOs) 21, 28–31, 73–4 Chile 319 China 38–9, 109, 112–15, 120–1, 130, 136, 140, 142, 145, 154, 156, 160, 171, 269, 276, 301, 309, 319–20 Christensen, Clayton 9, 107–8 Chuang, Alfred 87 CIA 18, 33, 50, 56 Cisco 106, 110, 211 Citibank 30, 121, 126 civil liberties, security issues 74 civilisation processes 84 clamshell design, mobile phones 170–1 Clarke, Richard 43, 75–6 cleaner energy ix–x, 233, 274–6 climate change ix clocks 82 clones, IBM PCs 9 cloning, biotechnology 239, 256, 267–71, 329 Clyde, Rob 67 CMOS chips 313–14 co-branding trends, mobile phones 161 Coburn, Pip 80–1, 89 Cockayne, Bill 66 Code Red virus 45, 49, 50, 54–5 Cognizant 125, 131 Cohen, Ted 228 cold technologies 31, 80 Cole, Andrew 163–5, 167 Comber, Mike 222 commoditisation issues, concepts 6–7, 8–16, 25, 132–5, 159, 203 Compal 156 Company 51 45–6, 54 Compaq 38 competitive advantages viii, 30 complexity problems ASPs 91–2, 109 byte’s-eye view 85–7 concepts viii, 14–16, 78–81, 82–110, 117–22 consumer needs 93–7 costs 79 creative destruction 107–10, 200, 326 desktops 100–2 digital homes 95–7 disappearance 82–4 “featuritis” 83–4 filtering needs 101–2, 339 front-end simplicity needs 84, 88, 99–102 historical background 80–4 infrastructural considerations 85–7, 117–22 IT viii, 14–16, 78–81, 82–110, 117–22 mergers 87 metaphors 100–2 “mom” tests 98 outsourcing 118–22 simplicity needs 78–81, 84, 87, 88–92, 98–110 web services 88–92 wireless technology 95–7, 109–10 “ws splat” 90–1 computer chips 4–12, 32–4, 85–7, 93, 95, 109, 119, 158, 161, 198–200, 202–3, 216, 313–14, 325–7 see also processing power Cell chips 198–200 costs 10, 14 heat generation 11–12 nanotechnology 313–14, 325–7 types 199–200, 202–3, 313–14 UWB chips 216 Computer Security Institute (CSI) 50–2, 62 Comviq 109 Condé Nast Building 301 consumer electronics see also customers; digital homes; gaming; mobile phones Cell chips 198–200 concepts viii–ix, 94–7, 99–102, 119, 147, 198–200, 203, 338–9 hard disks 204–8 control systems see also security... cyber-terrorism threats 75–6 Convergys 121, 126–9 copyright ix, 34 Corn, Joe 82 Cornice 208 Corporate Watch 318 costs viii, 4–7, 10, 14–15, 29–31, 70–4, 79, 186, 275–6, 283, 295–8, 311, 332–6 calculations 30–1 complexity problems 79 computer chips 10, 14 343 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY downward trends viii, 4–7, 14 energy alternatives 275–6 flat-panel displays 230–1 gaming budgets 186 hybrid cars 295–8 networks 14–15 outsourcing 112–24, 131–5, 140–3 performance links 29–30 robots 332–6 security issues 45–6, 50–1, 62, 70–4 storage costs 14–15 viruses 50–1 VOIP 104–6, 167 cotton 252–5 crashes, innovations vii, 4, 5–8, 39, 107, 134 creative destruction 107–10, 200, 326 credit cards 114, 117–18, 129, 338 Crick, Francis 236, 247, 271 crime fraud 52, 61–3, 181–3 mobile phones 180–3 CRM see customer relationship management crops, GM 251–5, 270–1 Crosbie, Michael 302 Cruise, Tom 64–5 Crystal Palace 299 CSI see Computer Security Institute CSM Worldwide 291–2, 297 CTC 288 cultural issues outsourcing 122, 142 technology 93–4 customer relationship management (CRM) 19, 47 customers see also consumer electronics complexity issues 93–7 cultural issues 93–4, 142 powers 26–7, 28–31, 36–40, 83–4 satisfaction 22, 24, 28–31 simplicity needs 78–81, 84, 87, 88–92, 98–110 vendors 94–7 cutting-edge economics 17 Cypress Semiconductor 32 Czech Republic 114, 120, 319 Czerwinski, Mary 100 D D-VARS 288 DaimlerChrysler 292, 295–6 Danger 152 data centres 17, 21, 84–92, 117–22 data services, mobile phones 164–5, 170–1 databases 17–18, 20–1, 35, 36–7, 56, 69, 101–2 Davidson, Mary Ann 56 Davies, Geoff 53, 72–4 de Felipe, Charles 87 344 de Vries, Pierre 55 Dean, David 160 deCODE 243–4 Dedo, Doug 67 Delacourt, Francis 143 Dell 8, 9, 85, 88, 109, 114–15, 131, 150, 202–3, 230 DeLong, Brad 36 Demos 318 Denman, Ken 212 Denmark 289 deployment period, revolutionary ideas 6 Dertouzos, Michael 78 desktops 100–2 Deutsche Bank 121, 126, 161, 164 diesel cars 296–7, 314–15 Diffie, Whitfield 43, 56 digital cameras 78, 95, 179–83, 203, 204 digital homes ix, 94–7, 147, 200, 202–32 see also flat-panel displays; TV; video...; wireless technology competitors 202–3 concepts 147, 200, 202–32 future prospects 202–3 hard disks 204–8, 219–20 iPod music-players ix, 99–100, 102, 172, 192, 203, 204, 207–8, 219–29 media hubs 202–3 music 204, 207–8, 219–29 PCs 202–3 UWB 96–7, 214–19 Wi-Fi 34–5, 66–7, 93, 95–7, 153, 203, 209–18 digital immigrants 81, 93, 109 digital natives 81, 93 digital video recorders (DVRs) 205–6 direct-sequence ultrawideband (DS-UWB) 215–17 disaster-recovery systems 43–4 Dish Network 205 Disney 168 disruptive innovations, concepts 107–10, 200, 326 Diversa 253–4 DNA 236–41, 243–4, 247, 250, 262, 265, 312, 328 Dobbs, Lou 144 Dobkin, Arkadiy 130, 142 Dolly-the-sheep clone 256, 268 Donaldson, Ken 317 Dorel Industries 140 dotcom boom vii, 19, 37–9, 66, 79–81, 90, 92, 162, 309, 322, 339 double-clicking dangers, viruses 59–60 Dow 259–60, 263 DreamWorks 186 Drexler, Eric 316 DS, Nintendo 191–3 DS-UWB see direct-sequence ultrawideband INDEX Dun & Bradstreet 126 DuPont 259–60 DVD technology 203, 214, 224, 315 DVRs see digital video recorders E E*Trade 37 e-commerce 14, 71, 113 see also internet e-homes see digital homes e-mail viii, 42–57, 59–60, 99, 101, 104–6, 150, 156–7, 180 see also internet historical background 106 eBay 37, 91 economics, cutting-edge economics 17 The Economist x, 7, 66 Edison, Thomas Alva 82–3, 289 eDonkey 229 EDS 19–20, 60, 88, 120, 126, 134 Eigler, Don 310 electric cars 284, 290, 291–8 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) 285–9, 290, 295–6 electricity fuel cells 274–9, 280–1, 289–90, 297–8, 301, 315, 325 green buildings 233, 299–304 hybrid cars 233, 284, 291–8 hydrogen 233, 262–4, 271, 274–9, 289–90, 297–8 lithium-ion batteries 233, 280–4 micropower concepts 289 nanotechnology 314–15 power grids 233, 285–90 storage problems 275–6, 289–90 electrification age ix, 5, 19, 23, 39, 82, 83, 84, 134 Electronic Arts 187, 190 electronic-manufacturing services (EMS), mobile phones 155–6, 159–60 electrons 307 Eli Lilly 44 Ellison, Larry 5, 21–2, 38–40 embryonic stem cells 268–9 EMI 222–9 Emotion Engine chips 199–200 Empedocles, Stephen 321 employees future job prospects 136–9, 144–6 office boundaries 80–1, 94 outsourcing viii, 112–46 resistance problems 31 security threats 58–63, 69 VOIP 104–6 EMS see electronic-manufacturing services encryption 53–4, 86–7 energy internet 285–90 energy technology ix–x, 233, 274–304, 314–15 alternative production-methods 275–6, 286, 289 concepts 274–304, 314–15 demand forecasts 277–9 fuel cells 233, 262–4, 271, 274–9, 280–1, 289–90, 297–8, 301, 315, 325 green buildings 233, 299–304 hybrid cars 233, 284, 291–8 hydrogen 233, 262–4, 271, 274–9, 289–90, 297–8 lithium-ion batteries 233, 280–4 nanotechnology 314–15 power grids 233, 285–90 production costs 275–6 renewable energy 275–6, 286, 289, 300 Engelberger, Joe 334 enterprise consumers 94–7 enterprise software 20, 35 Environmental Defence 319 enzymes, biotechnology 258–64 Epicyte 256–7 EPRI see Electric Power Research Institute Eralp, Osman 225 Ericsson 155–6, 158, 171 ETC 317–18 Ethernet 210–11 Europe see also individual countries fuel cells 274 mobile phones 163–9, 174 outsourcing 140–6 EV-DO see CDMA...

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Published 6 Oct 2021

The first of these was an article in Scientific American15 by computer scientist John Kemeny, who later developed the BASIC programming language (and was Einstein’s assistant at the IAS when Nash called on him). The second, which appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction later that year, was by the author Philip K. Dick, whose work would form the basis of films such as Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990 and 2012) and Minority Report (2002).16 His ‘Autofac’ is the tale of automatic factories set on consuming the Earth’s resources to make products that no one needs – and more copies of themselves. Dick closely followed von Neumann’s career, and his story had been written the year before the Scientific American piece about automata appeared.17 Humans rise up against ceaselessly productive machines in Philip K.

…

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations A Beautiful Mind (film) 198 ‘A Model of General Economic Equilibrium’ (von Neumann) 151, 312n21 A New Kind of Science (Wolfram) 251–3 Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland 72–3, 83, 105, 128, 135–8 additivity postulate 51–2, 297–8n59 Aiken, Howard 104 air power 83, 183–6 Alchian, Armen 206–7 Alcsuti, Lili 7, 14, 66 Alexander, James 68 algorithms and mathematical logic 28, 115, 179 matchmaking, see ‘Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm’ Monte Carlo 137 altruism 179–81, 316n82 Amazon 173, 179 American Institute of Physics 58 American Mathematical Society 77 Analog (science fiction magazine) 58 Analytical Engine 290n12 anti-Semitism 2, 5, 14–15, 62–64, 78, 118, 142, 152–3, 155, 198 Apollinaire, Guillaume 154–165 Apple 16, 173, 179 Applied Mathematics Panel 104, 187–8, 191 Archimedes x Aristotle 112 Arizona, University of 188, 258 Arnold, Henry ‘Hap’ 183–6, 209 ARPANET, the 103 Arrow, Kenneth 151 artificial intelligence 121, 122, 257, 264, 274, 275–276 Artificial Living Plants 263, 325n72 ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) 104 Atanasoff, John Vincent 127 Atlas Missile Project 216–18 atom bomb ‘gun type’ 81–2, 86 implosion method 82, 84–9, feasibility of 80 origins of 77–8 petition against use 92–3 power 80, 91, 95 targets 94 see also Manhattan Project Atomic Energy Commission 14 Oppenheimer hearing 211–12 Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell 52 Augenstein, Bruno 216–18, 217 Aumann, Robert 178 Austria, Nazi annexation of 1187, 154–5 automata cellular 234–7, 236, 243–53 Conway’s achievements 237–41, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243 evolution of 229, 236–7 most fecund 272–3 kinetic theory of 228–32, 269–70, 272, 273 see also self-reproducing automata Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) 121, 125 Axelrod, Robert 181, 272 Aydelotte, Frank 128–9, 130 Babbage, Charles 290n12 Bacharach, Michael 172 backward induction 164, 319n51 Bainbridge, Kenneth 90–2 Ballistics Research Laboratory 72–3, 77, 79, 105, 107–8, 110, 128, 135, 136 bargaining problem, the 199 Barricelli, Nils Aall 254–5, 256, 257 Bartik, Jean 1321, 135 Bath, Nautical Almanac Office 79 Belfast 52 Bell, John Stewart 52–7, 60 critique of VNs impossibility proof 52–4 and the EPR paradox 55–7 Bell, Mary 52 Bell’s inequality 56–7, 60 Berlin, Bebelplatz 64 Berlin, University of 12, 21, 25–6, 39–41, 40 Bernstein, Jeremy 274 Bertlmann, Reinhold 56 Bigelow, Julian 130, 138, 140 Bikini Atoll 98 Binmore, Ken 166, 168 Birkhoff, Garrett 69–70 Birkhoff, George 69 Blackett, Patrick 188 Blade Runner (film) 231 Blair, Clay 192–3 bluffing 166–8 Bockscar 95–6 Bohm, David 53–5, 56–7 Bohr, Niels 29–30, 31, 35, 43–9, 57, 76, 78, 156, 296n43, 301n23 Boltzmann, Ludwig 69 Bolyai, János 17–18, 19 bombs, maximising destructive power of 73, 83 Borel, Émile 146–7, 169 Born, Max 32–3, 34–5, 63–4, 293–4n10 Bowyer, Adrian 225 brain, the information processing (IP) metaphor 276 structure 227–8, 273 workings of 273–6 Brainerd, John 108 Braun, Wernher von 265 Brenner, Sydney 231 Brodie, Bernard 218, 222 Bronowski, Jacob 142, 164 Brouwer, L.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

But the nature of the Internet has changed, and that’s the reality we must respond to by pushing governments to act. Some of my pessimism arises from the extrapolation of technologies. We tend to extrapolate from the world of today, with only a few major changes. My favorite example comes from the 1982 movie Blade Runner, which features androids so advanced that they are impossible to identify without specialized equipment. Yet when Deckard—Harrison Ford’s character—wants to meet one of them, he uses a coin-operated pay phone because they couldn’t imagine cell phones. We also tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change while underestimating the long-term effects.

…

Abbott Labs, 38, 41 Access Now, 214 accountability, 112, 128, 147 ACLU, 223 ad blockers, 16 African Union, 89 airline safety, 144 airplanes: bugs in, 41 remote control of, 1–2, 16 air traffic control, 210 Alexa (Amazon’s virtual assistant), 4, 61 Alexander, Keith, 118 algorithms: accurate inputs required by, 84 autonomous, 7, 82–87 data needed by, 84 hacking of, 83–84 machine learning, 82–83, 85, 111–12 physical agency of, 83 and robots, 86–87 security standards for, 111–12, 148 speed of, 84–85 Alibaba website, 169 Alphabet (Google’s parent company), 57 Alphonso, 58 Amazon, 57, 61, 62 Amnesia IoT botnet, 37 Amnesty International, 223 Anderson, Ross, 185 Andromeda botnet, 52 Angry Birds, 58 anonymity, 52, 53, 110, 199–200 Apple, 57, 60, 78, 174, 196 Applied Cryptography (Schneier), 32 Arab Spring, 67 arbitration agreements, 129 Arthur Andersen, 127 artificial intelligence (AI), 7, 86–87, 95, 148, 149, 219 Ashley Madison, hacking of, 78 AT&T, 113 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 149 attack vs. defense, 160–79 attack as US priority in, 73 attack easier than defense, 219 attacks changing in, 32–33 “defense dominant” strategy, 160 design for security vs. surveillance, 167–70 fixing vulnerabilities in, 162–67 in law enforcement, 173–76 offensive autonomous attack software, 85 and relationship between government and industry, 176–79 security as, 10, 16, 26–28 zero days in, 162, 163, 165 attribution, 52–55 in cyberattacks, 72, 203 detection evasion, 55 main points of, 54 authentication, 45–51 continuous, 47 differential, 47, 49 hub-and-spoke model of, 50 and identification, 51 and identity theft, 50–51, 171 and impersonation, 51 in Internet+, 49–51 methods of, 46 standards of, 109, 169 trade-off between security and usability in, 47 two-factor, 47, 49, 200 automobiles: aging, 39–40 bugs in, 41 driverless, 4, 205 industry regulation of, 182, 186 international markets for, 186, 187 Internet connection in, 6 manufacturer support of, 39–40 remote hacking of, 1, 3, 16 repair manuals for, 139 safety of, 139, 182 security standards for, 151 availability, attacks on, 78–82 Azimuth, 162 baby monitors, 133–35 backdoors, 26, 87, 88, 172, 174, 193–98, 220 Baker, Stewart, 204 balkanization, 157 banks, data manipulation attacks on, 81–82 Baratov, Karim, 30 Beckstrom, Rod, 19 Belan, Alexsey, 30 Bell, Alexander Graham, 152 best efforts, 122 Beyond Fear (Schneier), 211 “big data,” 57 biometrics, authentication via, 46, 47 Bismarck, Otto von, 220 bitcoin, 15, 74, 75, 77, 198, 218 blackouts, 29, 90 Blade Runner (film), 218 Blaster worm, 94 Bluetooth, 50, 58, 79 Bohm, Nick, 220 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), 22, 23, 24, 115 Boston Marathon bombing (2013), 95, 202 Boston MBTA, 42 botnets, 26, 75, 77, 95, 139 Bowman Dam, Rye, New York, 79 breach disclosure laws, 137–38 bribery, 183 Brightest Flashlight, 58 BT, 113 Buckshot Yankee, 66 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, 157 buffer overflow bug, 21 bug bounties, 36 bugs, 20–21, 41 CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) [1994], 168, 170 California, “Teddy Bears and Toasters” bill in, 187–88 Calo, Ryan, 149 Cameron, David, 197 Campos, Hugo, 63 CAN-SPAM Act (2003), 154 Caproni, Valerie, 193 “Capture the Flag” (hacking sport), 85 Carbon Black, 74 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 183 caveat emptor, 131 Cellebrite, 174 cell towers, 32–33 fake, 168–70 Center on Privacy and Technology, 224 CEO fraud, 75 Challenger, 29 Check Point (Israeli company), 87 Cheney, Dick, 76, 93, 94 Chertoff, Michael, 198 Child Online Protection Act (1998), 154, 192–93 child porn, 183 China: and African Union headquarters, 89 censorship in, 67–68 and cybercrime law, 156, 158 cyberespionage by, 66, 67, 81 eavesdropping on communications, 195–96 hacking by, 45 intellectual property theft by, 66, 72–73 social control in, 67–68 China Telecom, 113 chips: general-purpose, 6 vulnerabilities in, 21 CIA, 73, 77, 165–67 Cisco Internet switches, 170 cities, smart sensors in, 4, 6 Citizen Lab, 64 Clapper, James, 66, 81 Clark, David, 23 class-action lawsuits, 129 class breaks: hacking via, 33, 95 use of term, 31–32 click fraud, 16, 75 cloud computing, 7, 190 Code for America, 223 Cogent ISP, 115 Cohen, Julie, 154 Comcast, 62, 113 Comey, James, 193–94 Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, 180–81 complexity, 11, 27 and accidents, 80 theory of, 210 and unpredictability, 211 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986), 42 computers: extensibility of, 24–26 as ubiquitous, 1–5, 19 vulnerabilities in, 30–32 confidentiality, threats to, 78–81 Consumers Union, 136, 145 copy protection, 25, 41, 62, 131, 154, 155, 205 Core Infrastructure Initiative, 115 corporations: CEO fraud in, 75 consumers controlled by, 59–64 data sought by, 57 infrastructure controlled by, 117 insecurity favored by, 56 profit maximization by, 118 regulation evaded by, 154–55 surveillance capitalism in, 57–59, 65, 209 CrashOverride, 2, 4–5 credential stealing, 45–47 credit card fraud, 16, 100 crime rate, public toleration of, 92 crimeware-as-a-service (CaaS), 76 cryptanalysis, differential, 33 cryptocurrencies, 172, 198 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 95 “cyber,” as umbrella term, 183–84 cyberattacks, 68–74, 116, 203, 217 Cyberbit (Israel), 65 cybercrime, 74–77, 156, 158 cyberdefense: “active,” 203 national agency for, 148 cyberespionage, see espionage Cyber Grand Challenge, 85 cyber incident data repository, 177 cyber peace, 213–14 cyberphysical systems, 7 cyber resilience, 211–12 cybersecurity, see Internet+ security Cybersecurity Improvement Act (2017), 180, 208 Cyber Shield Act (2017), 136 cyberstalking, 76 Cyber Threat Alliance, 177 cyberwar, 68–74 arms race in, 73, 116, 212–14 attribution in, 72 autonomous weapons in, 86 cyberespionage vs., 72 cyber mercenaries in, 70 limited response in, 71 “preparing the battlefield,” 69 and unpeace, 71–74 cyberweapons: in armed conflict, 72 autonomous, 86 instability of, 72, 212 manufacturers, 65 nonproliferation standards for, 158 theft of, 73 Daniel, Michael, 164 Darknet, 198 DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 85 data: accuracy of, 84 in adversarial machine learning, 84 anonymity of, 110 as byproduct, 57 “Collect it all,” 118 deletion of, 110 encryption of, 109, 171 integrity of, 80, 81, 109 jurisdiction over, 146 limits on collection of, 109 metadata, 174 natural bias of, 84 ownership of, 109 personal, control of, 62–63, 64, 109–11 sharing of, 177–79 storage and processing of, 174 Data and Goliath (Schneier), 110, 172 databases: encryption of, 171 threats to, 79, 80, 81 data brokers, 58 Data Encryption Standard (DES), 32, 33 DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, 29, 130, 202 Deepwater Horizon disaster, 124 “defense dominance,” 160 see also attack vs. defense Democratic National Committee, Russian attacks on (2016), 30, 45, 78, 80 denial of service, 29, 79, 81, 130, 202 Department of Homeland Security, 117, 138 Derechos Digitales, Chile, 214 detection evasion, 55 Digital HKS, Harvard, 224 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 41–42, 62, 154, 193, 205–6, 220 digital rights management (DRM), 25, 62, 205 Digital Security Helpline, 214 DNSChanger malware, 37 Doctorow, Cory, 163 Dodd-Frank Act (2010), 126 Domain Name Service, 24, 115 security (DNSSEC), 24 domino effect, 210 “Don’t Panic,” 174 drones, 7, 80, 91, 95, 151, 200 Dyn, botnet attack against, 94, 202 Edgehill program (UK), 168 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (1986), 153 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 32, 223 Who Has Your Back?

Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement
by Ashley Shew
Published 18 Sep 2023

They are supposed to wait in hope for the day when technology advances enough to help their “broken” bodies or minds, which are depicted as less worthy of love, care, pride, and positivity. In contrast, the amputee “problem”—the problem of being an amputee, particularly a leg amputee—is often depicted as being “solved.” People point to Paralympian-turned-murderer Oscar Pistorius (“the Blade Runner”) and Amy Purdy on Dancing with the Stars. The parameters for being a successful amputee (which generalize to parameters for being a successful disabled person, period) are clear: recover, overcome, inspire, become “normal” again but with the added razzle-dazzle of technological enhancement. There are lots of breathless news stories about prosthetic technologies, exoskeletons, and technologies aimed at “fixing” disabilities.

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
by David A. Mindell
Published 3 Apr 2008

In 1967 Lewis Mumford named the ‘‘megamachine’’ as the aggregate of technology, social organization, and management that suppressed individual human values. Human and Machine in the Race to the Moon 13 Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968 (later made into the film Blade Runner), recasting traditional demarcations between humans and machines. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) took ‘‘the rocket’’ as its central literary figure, exploring the technical, psychological, and religious dimensions of a state that worshiped at the altar of technology, and the paranoia engendered by its invisible, clockwork plans.21 NASA and its astronauts faced such tensions in the daily engineering of their systems, questions with the potential to undermine the symbolic agenda of the program.

…

Christmas Eve mission and, 178 computers and, 104–106, 123–143 (see also Computers) Index Eagle landing and, 1–4, 7–8, 217–232 human factors and, 217–227 lack of accuracy and, 235 Medal of Freedom and, 232 congressional support of, 96 pilots’ reasons for manual control and, 259 cost of, 5, 106, 109, 143, 251 pitch over and, 220–221 deaths and, 173 powered descent and, 217–220 decision points and, 103 scientist resignations and, 257 early missions and, 174–177 firmware and, 154–157 simulators and, 217, 220 Apollo 12, 261 G&N System Panel and, 148–149, 160 accuracy and, 235–237 Gemini and, 86 Conrad and, 236–243 guidance systems and, 102–114, 174–180, DELTAH and, 237 243 goal of, 235–236 gyro culture and, 96–97 improvements on, 236 human factors and, 14–15, 160–166 (see also landing point designator (LPD) and, 237–238 Human factors) Instrumentation Laboratory and, 96, 105–121 lunar module (LM) of, 236–237 Noun 69 and, 236–237, 242–243 (see also Instrumentation Laboratory) pilots’ reasons for manual control and, 259 J-missions and, 249–250 pitch over and, 238 Kennedy and, 5–7, 12, 61, 91, 95, 104–105, powered descent initiation (PDI) and, 237 107, 111, 134, 251, 270 procedural changes in, 236–237 landings and, 181–215 reaction control system (RCS) and, 237–238 management conflicts and, 133–137 simulators and, 238 optics issues and, 114–119 Polaris and, 104–105, 110 velocity indicator and, 241–242 Apollo 13, 9, 186, 243 project management and, 169–174 Apollo 13 (film), 9 project-oriented histories of, 9–10 Apollo 14, 233 safety requirements and, 134–135 backup systems and, 248–249 simulators and, 2–3, 51, 54 (see also hardware failure and, 243–248 Simulators) pilot skills and, 248–249 social effects of, 8–10 pilots’ reasons for manual control and, 260 software and, 145–180 (see also Software) sole-source contract and, 107–108 pitch over and, 251 powered descent initiative (PDI) and, 245– Apollo 1, 173 Apollo 4, 174–175 Apollo 5, 175–176, 233 Apollo 6, 176 247 Apollo 15, 250 pilots’ reasons for manual control and, 260 pitch over and, 251–255 Apollo 7, 176–177 Apollo 16, 250–251, 255, 260 Apollo 8, 177–180 Apollo 17, 251 Apollo 10, 190, 217, 256 Apollo 11, 9–10, 251, 261 computer alarms and, 221–227 descent orbit insertion (DOI) and, 217–218 pilots’ reasons for manual control and, 260 pitch over and, 258 scientist-astronauts and, 256–257 Apollo 18, 251 Index Armstrong, Neil, 1–3, 213, 241–242, 259 airmen school and, 29, 31 Apollo 11 and, 217–232 337 information flows and, 162–163 Instrumentation Laboratory courses and, 158–159 confusion of, 226 landings and, 181–215 (see also Landings) digital computers and, 87 literature by, 9 Eagle landing and, 217–232 lunar module (LM) design and, 184–186 Gemini and, 85 manual reentry and, 160 gimbal reliability and, 120 masculinity and, 13–14 instrumentation and, 35, 181, 295n53 Johnsville tests and, 70–72 Mercury and, 73–83 moonwalks and, 83, 268–269 Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) and, pilot transitions and, 161–166 (see also Pilots) 214 replacement of, 158 Medal of Freedom and, 232 rockets and, 65–66 pilot role and, 80 scientist-astronauts and, 256–257 Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) user errors and, 160 and, 224, 226 women and, 13 X-15 and, 49, 58–59, 61 Army Ballistic Missile Agency, 66 Astronomical Guidance course, 101 AT&T, 37 Artificial horizons, 24 Atlas rocket, 18, 72–77 AS-202, 172 Atomic frequency standards, 138 AS-204, 171 Attitude, 47–48, 77 AS-501, 174–175 Adams’s death and, 59–61 ASPO, 134–135, 139 eight ball and, 159 Astronautical Guidance (Battin), 100–101 landing point designator and, 204–206 Astronauts active role of, 65 pitch over and, 251–255 Automation, 6, 12 age of systems and, 38–41 adaptive control systems and, 57–61 automation and, 158–166 airliners and, 267 as calibrators, 105 Apollo and, 92, 94, 105–109, 119–121, 139– computers and, 66, 160–166 142, 177–180, 243, 258 constraints for, 159–160 astronaut input and, 158–166 control and, 65–66 booster rockets and, 72 dangerous actions and, 159–160 deaths of, 173 computers and, 123–143 (see also Computers) Eagle landing and, 221–227 deployable optics and, 117 future of, 263–271 digital autopilot and, 139–142 Gemini and, 86–88 displays for, 165–169 human factors and, 4–8 (see also Human Eagle landing and, 1–4, 217–232 factors) Explorers Club and, 271 landings and, 181–215 (see also Landings) future of, 263–271 lunar module (LM) and, 193–197, 199–201 Gemini and, 83–88 ‘‘go to moon’’ interface and, 160–161 Mercury and, 73–83 pilots and, 17–21, 26, 43, 66–69, 73–83, human interface and, 4–8, 160–166 (see also Human factors) 139–142, 259–260 Soviet space program and, 88–90, 93–94 338 Automation (cont.) stability augmentation system (SAS) and, 55– 57, 60 systems engineering and, 36–41 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and, 267 Aviation Index Bennett, Floyd, 241, 251, 300n47 computer alarms and, 225–226 Exceptional Service Medal and, 240 landing design and, 187–188, 192, 207 technical project summation of, 242–243 Bikle, Paul, 90 airmen vs. chauffeur school and, 21–23 Black boxes, 34–36, 39, 54, 57, 135 control and, 17–22 Blackburn, Al, 35, 39–40, 68 faster-and-higher goal and, 44 High Speed Flight Station and, 43–44 Black Friday, 171 Blade Runner (film), 13 Kitty Hawk and, 44 Blair, Charles, 40–41 National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics Blair-Smith, Hugh, 126, 149 (NACA) and, 6, 26–28 Blind flying, 24–26, 53–54 pilot’s role and, 17–21 (see also Pilots) Bode, Henrik, 33 skill and, 22–23 Boeing, 92, 267 stability and, 17–22 Bomarc missile, 18, 61 Aviation Week and Space Technology, 179, 267 Bonestell, Chesley, 111 Borman, Frank, 84, 169, 179 B-2 bomber, 266–267 Boston Globe, 248 B-17 bomber, 75 Boston Herald, 179 B-52 bomber, 47–48, 50, 54, 63 Bowditch, Philip, 114 Bales, Steven, 3, 222 Bronson, Charles, 62 Ballistic flight paths, 44 Brown, Alexander, 101 Barnstormers, 10, 20 BURNBABY, 218 Basic (Apollo computer language), 149 BASIC (Dartmouth computer language), 149 Bush, Vannevar, 98 Butler, Rhett, 28 Bassett, Preston, 43 Battin, Richard, 104, 127, 170, 194 Cape Canaveral, 134 Apollo 8 and, 178 Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM), 218, 222 computer errors and, 232 Carpenter, Scott, 81, 121 decision points and, 103 Centrifuge tests, 70–72 lunar mission and, 102–103 Century series jets, 32–33 orbital transfers and, 101–102 project management and, 170 Cernan, Gene, 251, 256–260 Cessnas, 267 Q-guidance technique and, 100 Chance-Vought, 30 recursive estimation of, 102–103 Charles Stark Draper Laboratories, 96–97 software and, 145–146, 151, 158 Chauffeur school, 21–23 Bean, Alan, 236–237, 240 Becker, John, 44–45 Apollo and, 160–161 X-15 and, 46–49 Bell Aerosystems, 210–211 Cheatham, Donald, 186–187, 204 Bellcomm, 135 Bellman, Donald, 210 Cherry, George, 189 Chilton, Robert, 264 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 37, 263 Apollo computer and, 128 Index guidance systems and, 96, 104–107 pilot role and, 75–77, 91–93 339 analog, 52–54, 57–58 Apollo 4 and, 174–175 Cockpit, The (magazine), 31 Apollo 5 and, 175 Cockpits, 24–29 Apollo 7 and, 177 Cohen, Aaron, 88, 112–113, 136–137, 142 Apollo 11 and, 221–227 Colliers magazine, 111 Apollo 14 and, 243–249 Collier Trophy, 61 astronaut’s view of, 66, 158–166 Collins, Michael, 1, 10, 265 B-2 stealth bomber and, 266–267 Columbia and, 217–218 guidance systems and, 116, 121 Medal of Freedom and, 232 Block I AGC, 123–136, 143, 172 Block II AGC, 136–143, 149, 154, 171, 175– 176 pilot role and, 82, 87, 93 core logic and, 125–126 simulators and, 209 crashes and, 123–124 symbolism and, 11 digital, 62, 87, 139–142 COLOSSUS, 151 displays and, 152, 165–169 Columbia space shuttle, 49, 217–218, 264–265 Eagle landing and, 1–4, 6, 221–232 Command and service module (CSM), 1, 33, 135, 146 electrical noise and, 2–3 embedded assumptions of, 13–14 AGC interface and, 168 ENIAC, 98 Apollo 12 and, 236–237 firmware and, 154–157 COLOSSUS and, 151 FORTRAN and, 99 Columbia and, 217–218 future of, 263–271 digital autopilot and, 139–142 G&N System Panel and, 148–149 docking and, 186, 192–193 Gemini and, 87–88 future of, 265–266 gimbal reliability and, 120–121 general-purpose, 123 ‘‘go to moon’’ interface and, 160–161 guidance systems operation plan (GSOP) for, guidance systems and, 104–106, 114, 123– 151–152 lunar module (LM) and, 186, 192–193 P40 program and, 150 142 human-machine relationship and, 4–8 (see also Human factors) radar and, 191 humidity effects and, 137–138 simulators and, 208–209 IBM 360, 148 software for, 146 Communications, 2, 15, 77 in-flight repair and, 128–130, 137–138, 159 instrument flying and, 25 Eagle and, 221–227 integrated circuits (ICs) and, 125–127 jamming and, 97, 104, 138 keyboards and, 152, 160–161, 165–169 landings and, 190–191, 221–227 landing integration and, 191 teleprinter and, 108–109 Laning and, 99–102 Compasses, 24 MAC project and, 148 Computers, 15 mainframe, 148 AGC, 126–128, 133, 137, 143 (see also AGC [Apollo guidance computer]) Alonso and, 100, 102 Mars probe and, 99–101, 154 mean time between failure (MTBF) of, 130, 133 340 Computers (cont.) memory issues and, 152, 154, 171–172 Index astronauts and, 65–66 backup systems and, 248–249 MicroLogic-based, 125–126 black boxes and, 54 mini, 123 blind flying and, 24 Mod 3C, 124–126 booster rockets and, 71–72 mundane work and, 14 centrifuge tests and, 70–72 NASA choice of, 5–6 chauffeur school and, 21–23 night-watchman circuit and, 124 cockpit design and, 24–29 onboard, 88 pilots and, 1–7, 19–21, 107, 161–166 damping and, 58–61 dangerous actions and, 159–160 Polaris and, 98–99, 125–127 digital autopilot and, 139–142 programmable, 123 display and keyboard (DSKY) unit and, 165– RAM and, 124–125 169 reliability of, 123–143 early Apollo missions and, 174–180 removable modules and, 129 feedback systems and, 33 ROM and, 124–125 first rendezvous in space and, 84–85 simulation development and, 51–54 software and, 129–131 (see also Software) fly-by-wire and, 79, 81, 140, 266 flying qualities and, 26–28 Soviets and, 90 G&N System Panel and, 148–149, 160, 168– space sextant and, 114–115 169 stability and, 19–21 gain and, 51 symbolism of, 12–13 Gemini and, 83–88 systems engineering and, 36–41, 133–137 Gilruth and, 27–28 time allocation and, 149–150 ‘‘go to moon’’ interface and, 160–161 transistors and, 125–130 user errors and, 160 ground, 62, 108–109, 138 (see also Ground control) vacuum tubes and, 130 instrument flying and, 24–25 (see also variable processing speed and, 106 Guidance systems) Whirlwind, 99, 124 Johnsville tests and, 70–73 workload and, 3 landings and, 181–215, 182–186 (see also Configuration control boards, 152 Landings) Conquest of the Moon (von Braun), 67–69 manual maneuvering and, 84–86 Conrad, Pete, 259 computers and, 140, 158 Mercury and, 74, 77–81 new technologies and, 267–268 landings and, 181, 214, 236–243 pilot induced oscillation and, 50–51 Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) and, primary navigation and guidance system 214 velocity indicator and, 241–242 Control, 17–18 (PNGS) and, 191 reentry, 55–57 rudder pedals and, 79 Adams’s death and, 59–61 simulation and, 2–3, 32, 51–54 adaptive, 57–61, 77 age of systems and, 36–41 software and, 147 (see also Software) Space Task Group (STG) and, 74–77 airmen school and, 21–23 stability and, 19–21 (see also Stability) Index supersonic flight and, 32–36, 44–45 three-axis stick and, 79 X-15 and, 48–51, 54–61 yaw dampers and, 35 341 Eagle and, 223, 229–231 human factors and, 165–169 landings and, 191, 196–197, 204 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

Historians such as Paul Edwards, Ted Friedman, and Fred Turner have analyzed, more than I have attempted to do here, the close links between counterculture ideals and skepticism toward unrestrained technological power. They point to films such as Desk Set (1957), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), and The Terminator (1984) as well as books such as Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964), E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) as indicators of an emerging critical approach to capitalist technology. These ideas took root in the freewheeling corporate cultures in Silicon Valley, which nurtured a fusion between the hacker critique of centralized control and a libertarian strain of individual freedom and empowerment.57 It would be oversimplifying matters, however, to reduce the critiques of centralized control that matured in the 1960s and 1970s to some sort of irresistible triumph of a populist or democratic control over technology.

…

generally 14, 246, 280 OSI and 200, 216–217, 219, 222, 227, 235, 237–238, 242–243 SPARC and 204–215 Backus, John 155 Bailyn, Bernard 4 Baran, Paul 167–168 Barber, Derek 170–171, 189, 201–202 Barlow, John Perry 260 Barr, W.H. 78–80 Baruch, Bernard 64 Batty, K.C. 226 Bell, Alexander Graham 32, 114 Bell Labs 104, 110, 136–137, 167–168 see also Bell System Bell System administrative standardization 99 AESC and 119–120 AIEE and 97–98, 114, 128 antitrust actions 142 ASA and 97–98, 121–122, 128, 129 ASTM and 128 Bell System Practices 109–110, 269 Bell System Standards 120 breakup of 142 consensus standardization at 114–129 Consent Decree 137 cooperative process in 100–102 creation of 98–104 critiques of centralized control 131–132, 133 D&R Bulletins 108, 109, 120 Development and Research Department 106–107, 108, 117, 125 engineering at 104–114 FCC and 132, 135–137, 138, 141–142, 158 General Engineering Circulars (GEC) 107–108, 109, 115–116 historical background 98–99 inductive interference problem 114–119 monopoly standardization in 95–98 Operations and Engineering Department 106–107 overview 22–23, 95–98, 129–130, 268–269 public image of 136–137 resistance to standardization 100 slug problem 122–128 Specifications 108, 109, 120 universal service and 102–104 Bell System Technical Journal 110 Bell Telephone Company 32, 99 see also Bell System Bell Telephone Magazine 109–110 Bell Telephone News 128 Bent, Quincy 87–88 Beranek, Leo 138 Bergson, Henri 9 Berner, Robert 149–153, 154 Berners-Lee, Tim 257, 273 Bethlehem Steel 87–88, 126 Blade Runner (film) 157 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) 168, 187, 249, 250 Bradner, Scott 256 Brady, Robert 92–93 Branscomb, Lewis 222, 261 Briggs, Lyman 78 Bright, Herb 151, 153–154, 156 British Academy 39 British Association for the Advancement of Science 38, 47 British Board of Trade 47 British Engineering Standards Committee (BESC) 19, 50–51, 62 British Standards Institute (BSI) 149, 202, 210 Brock, Gerald 154–155 Brooklyn Polytechnic 105 Brooks, Fred 144, 259, 263 Brooks, John 133 Brown, Richard 8 Brown, Ron 261 Buckley, Oliver 104 Burchfiel, Jerry 187 Bureau of Simplified Practice 85 Burroughs 145, 207 Bush, George H.W. 276 Business Equipment Manufacturers’ Association 139, 150 CableLabs 274 California Railroad Commission 115, 118–119 Callon, Ross 244, 249 Capp, J.A. 90–91 Cargill, Carl 14, 226, 251 Carlson, Bernie 41 Carlson, Walter 151 Carnegie, Andrew 50 Carnegie-Mellon University 166 Carter, Thomas 140–141 Carterfone 168 Carty, John J.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

It would take centuries for this drop to be reversed, even with a complete cessation of usage. We looked in awe at the most verticalised of cityscapes, ratcheted into the sky in a mere decade, rearing up from hundreds of miles of pancake-flat desert.3 It felt as though we’d arrived on some vast stage set for a highly sanitised sequel to Blade Runner made by Disney. Everywhere we looked there were exalted proclamations that the Burj Khalifa, which snaked ever upward like a sci-fi icon, heralded, along with the many other new skyscrapers in the city, Dubai’s arrival as a ‘world-class’ or ‘global’ city. No longer, it seemed, are the world’s tallest skyscrapers erected merely to house the headquarters of corporations competing for prestigious space in the centres of tightly packed financial districts.

…

The entirely new island-city of Eko Atlantic, currently being built using material dredged up from the Atlantic floor off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria, is a powerful example here. A private and deliberately elitist enclave of soaring towers and green parks built to house 250,000 people, the city evokes the offshoring of elites so commonly evoked in science-fiction films (think Blade Runner or Elysium). The World Bank’s man in Africa calls Eko Atlantic the ‘future Hong Kong of Africa’. Away from the dangers and violence of Lagos, and beneath the camouflage of some unconvincing greenwash, the city will be a particularly welcome home to the corporate elites who service the disastrously destructive oil exploitation in and around the Niger Delta.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

After outgrowing a handful of other offices, Kalanick leased several floors at 1455 Market Street—a bunker-like space in the middle of downtown—and soon rebuilt in high Uber style. Holes were knocked between two of the concrete floors to build a transparent glass staircase connecting the two levels. The multi-million-dollar staircase led to his favorite of the many Uber spaces, this one designed to reflect Kalanick’s taste. He dubbed the aesthetic “Blade Runner meets Paris,” a slew of black granite and see-through glass conference rooms, to be inhabited round the clock by engineers hunched over their silver MacBooks. Managers spent hours strategizing in the most clandestine place in the building: the “War Room.” Custom designed with boutique architects and furniture designers, the War Room was a large conference room placed dead center of Uber’s primary office floor, a box encased in glass held for important strategy meetings.

…

The Google co-founder showed up that night as the keynote speaker in a white T-shirt, black pants, and a worn pair of Crocs. Brin preferred comfort over style. As the video played, the audience saw an egg-shaped, stark white two-seater vehicle doing laps around a parking lot. It was ugly and small. The front of the vehicle looked like a smiley face, as if Humpty Dumpty had turned into a golf cart. Blade Runner this was not. None of that mattered. The car didn’t need a steering wheel, so it could be any shape. In the Dumpty-mobile sat two people. Neither did anything to drive the car as it zipped effortlessly around a Mountain View parking lot. As far as Kalanick was concerned, Google’s egg-shaped, self-driving monstrosity was a work of art.

Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe
Published 8 Sep 2011

In theory, a transit-oriented dwelling is located within half a mile of a light-rail platform, a subway station, or a high-frequency bus line. It should also be close enough to shopping and schools so that residents can reduce their driving, or even get by without a car altogether. In practice, following TOD principles has led to both Blade Runner-style cityscapes of high-rise condos towering over subway stations, and Our Town-like neighborhoods of closely spaced bungalows. Los Angeles, it turns out, has both kinds of TOD. Boarding a northbound Gold Line train at Union Station—this time riding away from East L.A.—I took a fifteen-minute ride and stepped off the platform into what looked like small-town America.

…

By the time the Express stops in Chiba, a satellite city of almost a million, all traces of countryside have been supplanted by multilevel bicycle parking lots, mesh-wrapped golf driving ranges, concrete-banked rivers, webworks of telephone and electrical lines, and the coruscating neon of pachinko parlors. But the Narita Express only ventures into the Blade Runner realm of outrageously asymmetrical skyscrapers and giant video screens in the last minutes of the journey, around the major stations of Tokyo, Shinagawa, and Shinjuku. For most of the trip, you travel through a seemingly endless landscape of closely spaced low-rise private homes, peppered with occasional outcroppings of four- to six-story apartment units, office towers, and department stores.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy, a sequence of three movies that appeared between 1977 and 1983, featured the world’s most famous (to date) robots, R2-D2 and C-3PO. The American television cartoon feature The Transformers, which focused on the adventures of gigantic robots with the ability to transform themselves into vehicles and weaponry, aired from 1984 to 1987. Both of these series were accompanied by massive sales of children’s toy figures. Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984) were other successful robot films of that time. Of course, robots had appeared in movies long before the 1970s, and they continue to do so today. In fact, robots in movies precede even the word robot coined by Čapek, the Czech playwright, which started to go viral in 1922.

…

See also gold standard Bitcoin narrative, xviii, 3–11; anarchism and, 5–7; bimetallism and, 108, 161–62, 171; cause of increased value and, 72; contagion of, 21–23; cosmopolitan culture and, 4, 11, 87; cryptocurrencies competing with, 92; epidemic theory applied to, 21–23; fading by 2013, 76; fascination with narratives about money and, 173; fear of inequality and, 8–9; the future and, 9–10, 87; geographic pattern of spread, 299; history of, 4; as human-interest story, 7–8; key features of, 87; mathematical concepts underlying, 5, 302n3; membership in world economy and, 11; as mystery story, 7, 8, 162; in news articles by year, 22, 22f; in news articles compared to relevant algorithms, 9–10; sale of Bitcoin in convenience stores and, 10; similarity to gold standard and bimetallism narratives, 108–9; as successful economic narrative, 3–4; technocracy movement and, 193; uncertain truth of, 96; volatility of value in, 5, 10. See also Nakamoto, Satoshi Bix, Amy Sue, 186–87 Blade Runner (film), 203 Blanc, Louis, 102 Blinder, Alan, 281 blockchains, 6 blue jeans, 147–48, 149 blue sky laws, 220, 221 Booker, Christopher, 16 book jackets, 60–61 Boulding, Kenneth E., xv–xvi Box, George E. P., 295 Boycott, Charles C., 239–40 The Boycott in American Trade Unions (Wolman), 241 boycott narrative, 239–43; in 1973–75 recession, 256–57; contributing to 1920–21 depression, 249; going viral, 241; during Great Depression, 254; origins of, 239–40; profiteer stories in World War I and, 241–42, 246; recurring periodically, 241; during world financial crisis of 2007–9, 257; after World War II, 255.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

And when we retreat from established trade relations it hurts the economy and makes it seem even more like a zero-sum game. If chaos and foes are all around us, we have to protect ourselves, we have to flee – or we have to man the barricades and fight back. 8 FIGHT OR FLIGHT ‘Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.’ Roy Batty in Blade Runner, 1982 ‘You know what a conservative is?’ Philadelphia’s mayor Frank Rizzo once asked rhetorically, ‘That’s a liberal who got mugged the night before.’ Rizzo, a blue-collar Democrat and a previous police commissioner, did not have any kind of tolerant, limited-government conservatism in mind, but his own racially tinted, big-government conservatism (‘Vote white,’ he urged his constituency in 1978).

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INDEX Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), 6, 136–7, 138, 169, 353 abortion, 113 absolutist monarchies, 154, 155, 170, 182, 185 Academy Awards, 82 Accenture, 375 accountants, 41 Acemoglu, Daron, 185, 187, 200 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88, 249 Acton, Lord, see Dalberg-Acton, John Adams, Douglas, 295 Adobe, 310 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 306 Aeschylus, 132 affirmative action, 244 Afghanistan, 70, 345 Age of Discovery, 177 agriculture, 39–40, 42, 74, 171, 263 Akbar I, Mughal Emperor, 98 Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC), 42 Alaska, 76 Albania, 54 Albertus Magnus, Saint, 145 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond, 154 Alexander III ‘the Great’, Basileus of Macedon, 87–9 Alexandria, Egypt, 134 algae, 332 algebra, 137 Alibaba, 311 Allport, Gordon, 244–5 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 alpha males, 227–8, 229 Alphaville, 245 altruism, 216 Amalric, Arnaud, 94 Amazon, 275, 311 America First, 19, 272 American Civil War (1861–5), 109 American Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 American Society of Human Genetics, 76–7 Americanization, 19 Amherst, William, 1st Earl Amherst, 176–7 amphorae, 48 Amsterdam, Holland, 150, 152, 153 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 anaesthesia, 279, 296 anagrams, 83 Anatolia, 42, 74 Anaximander, 127 Anaximenes, 127 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Andromeda, 88 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Anhui, China, 315 anti-Semitism, 11, 94–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 254, 255 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor, 91 Apama, 88 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5 Apple, 82, 195, 304, 311, 319 Apuleius, 89 Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 Arabic numerals, 70, 137, 156 Arabic, 136, 137, 140 archaeology, 21–2, 31, 32, 38, 43, 50, 51 Archer Daniels Midland, 329 Aristides, Aelius, 48 Aristophanes, 129, 131, 132 Aristotle, 130–31, 132, 137, 141–6, 161 Armenians, 136, 220 ARPAnet, 306 Art Nouveau, 198 art, 198 Artaxerxes III, Persian Emperor, 87 Ashkenazi Jews, 99 Ashoka, Mauryan Emperor, 53 Assyria (2500–609 BC), 248–9 Assyrian Empire (2500–609 BC), 41, 43, 86 astronomy, 80, 145–6, 150 Atari, 304 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131, 134 Atlas Copco, 65 Augustine of Hippo, 133, 139 Australia, 50–53, 76, 262 Australopithecus afarensis, 24–5 Austria, 1, 150, 151, 190 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 179, 254 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Habsburg monarchy (1282–1918), 151, 179, 190, 237 migration crisis (2015–), 342 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Nazi period (1938–45), 105 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 Authoritarian Dynamic, The (Stenner), 343 authoritarianism, 4, 14, 220, 343–61, 363, 379 democracy and, 357 economics and, 346–51 exposure to difference and, 242 innovation and, 318 insecurity and, 338, 342, 378 media and, 346–9 nostalgia and 351–4 predisposition, 220, 343–6 populism and, 325, 350–51 scapegoats and, 355–6 science and, 161–3 automatic looms, 179 automation, 63, 312–13 Averroes, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 Aztec Empire (1428–1521), 55 Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, 75 baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 Babylon, 39, 86–7 Babylonia (1895–539 BC), 39, 42, 43, 86–7, 128, 131, 249, 267 Bacon, Francis, 147, 156, 165–6, 201 bad news, 322 Baghdad, 70, 136, 353 Bahrain, 42 Bailey, Ron, 11 Bailyn, Bernard, 201 balance of trade, 59–60 Banda Islands, 100 Bangladesh, 270 Bannon, Steve, 14, 108 Barcelona, Catalonia, 320 Basel, Switzerland, 152 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Bayezid II, Ottoman Sultan, 98 Bayle, Pierre, 158 Beginning of Infinity, The (Deutsch), 332 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Beirut, Lebanon, 236 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Berges, Aida, 80 Bering land bridge, 76 Berkeley, see University of California, Berkeley Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 307–8 Bernstein, William, 42 Berossus, 267 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 243 Beveridge, William, 59 Béziers, France, 94 Bezos, Jeffrey, 274, 275–6, 277 Bi Sheng, 171 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 bicycles, 297 de Biencourt, Charles, 189 Big Five personality traits, 7 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 208, 356, 352, 356 Blade Runner, 334 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 124–6 Blue Ghosts, 236 Bohr, Niels, 105 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), 307 bonobos, 226–7 Book of Jonah, 248–50 Borjas, George, 116 Boston, Massachusetts, 122, 223 Boudreaux, Donald, 62, 270 Boulton, Matthew, 194 Bowles, Samuel, 216 Boym, Svetlana, 288 Brandt, Willy, 364 Brewer, Marilynn, 247 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Brezhnev, Leonid, 315 Britain, 169, 181–99 Acts of Union (1707), 101, 194 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 anti-Semitism in, 254 arts, 198 Bletchley Park, 124–6 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Cheddar Man, 74 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 colonies, 84, 191, 194, 200 Corn Laws repeal (1846), 53, 191 creative destruction in, 179 crime in, 119, 120 Dutch War (1672–4), 101 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 hair powder tax (1795), 72 immigration in, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 193–4 Industrial Revolution, 188–99, 202 innovation in, 53, 189–90 Internet, development of, 307–8 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Levellers, 183–4, 186 literacy in, 188, 198 literature, 188–9 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 London 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Magna Carta (1215), 5 monopolies, 182 MPs’ expenses scandal (2009), 345 Muslim community, 113 Navigation Acts, 192 nostalgia in, 294 open society, 169, 181–2, 195–9 patent system, 189–90, 203, 314 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 political tribalism in, 238, 240–41 poverty in, 256 railways in, 297 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196, 296 ruin follies, 286–7 slavery, abolition of (1807), 182, 205 smuggling in, 192 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 United States, migration to, 104 West Africa Squadron, 205 Whig Party, 185, 201 World War II (1939–45), 124–6 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 135 Bronze Age (c. 3300–600 BC) Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 migration to Europe, 74–5 Phoenician civilization, 43–6, 49, 70 Sumerian civilization, 42–3 Brotherton, Rob, 322 Brown, Donald, 219, 283 Bruges, Flanders, 208 Bruno, Giordano, 150 Bryn Mawr College, 201 Buddhism, 96, 149, 352 Bulgaria, 73, 342 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US, 65 Burke, Edmund, 152, 292 Bush, George Walker, 328 ByteDance, 318 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 94, 134, 135, 155, 224 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 Calvin, John, 149 Calvinism, 6, 99, 153, 356 Canada, 235, 258 Caplan, Bryan, 258 Caracalla, Roman Emperor, 91 Carbon Engineering, 332 Cardwell, Donald, 10 Cardwell’s Law, 10 Carlson, Tucker, 82, 302 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 Carthage (814–146 BC), 45 Caspian Sea, 75 Cathars, 94, 142 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 154 Catholicism, 208 in Britain, 101, 185–6, 191 Crusades, 94, 138 in Dutch Republic, 99 exiles and, 153 in France, 154 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 100, 106, 140, 233 Inquisition, 94, 97, 98, 100, 143, 150 in Italy, 6, 169 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106, 233 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 237 in Rwanda, 230–31 in United States, 102, 104, 108, 254 values and, 114 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 201 Celts, 89, 289 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 313 Ceres, 89 Cerf, Vinton, 307 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), 306, 307 chariot racing, 224 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 148, 179, 183 Chávez, Hugo, 354 Chechen War, Second (1999–2009), 354 Cheddar Man, 74 cheongsam dresses, 73 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 286, 300 Chicago principles, 164–5 Chicago, Illinois, 202 child mortality, 168–9 Child, Josiah, 184 children, 26 chimpanzees, 24, 25, 32, 36, 226–7, 228 China, 4, 5, 6, 13, 84, 270, 314–18 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 authoritarianism, 4, 162–3, 175, 318, 325, 343 budget deficits, 60 cheongsam dresses, 73 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 4, 11–12, 162–3 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 355 dictatorships, support for, 367 dynamism in, 315–18 ethnic groups in, 84 Great Wall, 178 industrialization 169, 172–3, 207 intellectual property in, 58 kimonos, 73 literacy in, 148 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 national stereotypes, 235, 236 overcapacity in, 317 paper, invention of, 136 private farming initiative (1978), 315–16 productivity in, 317 poverty in, 273, 316 Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179, 353 Reform and Opening-up (1979–), 4, 53, 56, 315–16 SARS outbreak (2002), 162 science in, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73, 269 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 Song dynasty (960–1279), 53, 169–75 state capitalism in, 316–17 Tang dynasty (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Taoism, 129, 149 trade barriers, 59 United States, migration to, 104, 109, 254 United States, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 WTO accession (2001), 63 Yuan Empire (1271–1368), 174–5 Zheng He’s voyages (1405–33), 177–8 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 Christensen, Clayton, 305 Christianity, 46, 70, 96, 129 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 in Britain, 101 Calvinism, 6, 99, 149, 153, 356 Cathars, 94, 142 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 Crusades, 94, 138 Catholicism, see Catholicism Dominican order, 356 in Dutch Republic, 99 economic hardship and, 359 fundamentalism, 133–5, 149 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Inquisition, 97, 98, 100 Jews, persecution of, 95, 96, 97 Lutheranism, 99, 356 in Mongol Empire, 96 Old Testament, 46, 72 orthodox backlash, 149–50 Orthodox Church, 155 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 233 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178 Puritanism, 99, 102 Rastafari and, 72 Reformation, 148, 155 in Roman Empire, 90, 93–4 science and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 97 tribalism and, 230–31, 246 zero-sum relationships and, 248–50 Chua, Amy, 84 Cicero, 141 Cilician, Gates, 42 cities, 40, 79, 140 division of labour in, 40 immigration and, 114, 250 innovation and, 40, 53, 79, 140, 145, 172, 287 liberalism and, 339 Mesopotamia, 37–43 open-mindedness and, 35 productivity and, 40, 98 tradition and, 287, 291 turtle theory and, 121–2 civic nationalism, 377–8 civil society, 6, 199, 253, 358, 363 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 362–3, 365–6 ‘Clash of Civilizations?’

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel
by Lonely Planet
Published 30 Sep 2015

The market will cover a massive 100,000 sq ft of space and will comprise around 100 carefully selected chefs, producers and street food talent from around the globe in a big bustling hawker center-style food hall on Pier 57. Although many details are still an unknown, the design for the space is going to be ‘crazy-looking’ and inspired by Blade Runner. If that’s not enough to whet your appetite, there will also be a butchery, a farmers’ market, a rooftop beer garden and an oyster bar. At the time of writing details are few and far between, but follow @Bourdain on Twitter for the latest updates as the project develops. 8 National Gallery Singapore Singapore boasts several world-class museums, but if you only have time to see one in 2016, make it the National Gallery Singapore.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker. So the “1984” ad was a way of reaffirming, to himself and to the world, his desired self-image. The heroine, with a drawing of a Macintosh emblazoned on her pure white tank top, was a renegade out to foil the establishment. By hiring Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of Blade Runner, as the director, Jobs could attach himself and Apple to the cyberpunk ethos of the time. With the ad, Apple could identify itself with the rebels and hackers who thought differently, and Jobs could reclaim his right to identify with them as well. Sculley was initially skeptical when he saw the storyboards, but Jobs insisted that they needed something revolutionary.

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He was able to get an unprecedented budget of $750,000 just to film the ad, which they planned to premiere during the Super Bowl. Ridley Scott made it in London using dozens of real skinheads among the enthralled masses listening to Big Brother on the screen. A female discus thrower was chosen to play the heroine. Using a cold industrial setting dominated by metallic gray hues, Scott evoked the dystopian aura of Blade Runner. Just at the moment when Big Brother announces “We shall prevail!” the heroine’s hammer smashes the screen and it vaporizes in a flash of light and smoke. When Jobs previewed the ad for the Apple sales force at the meeting in Hawaii, they were thrilled. So he screened it for the board at its December 1983 meeting.

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Abby Road (Beatles), 412 ABC, 219, 436, 438 Academy Awards, 244, 248 Adams, Ansel, 105, 277, 330 Adams, Scott, 523 Adobe, 241, 247, 381, 518 Apple and, 514–16 Adobe Director, 363 Adobe Flash, 380, 514–15, 517 Adobe Illustrator, 242 Adobe Photoshop, 380 Adobe Premiere, 380 Advertising Age, 165, 418 Advocate, The, 280, 282 A4 (microchip), 492–93, 496 Agnelli, Susanna, 126 Aguilera, Christina, 418 Agus, David, 550 Airborne Express, 359 Air Force, U.S., 23 AirPort (base station), 466 Akers, John, 219, 231, 569 Akon (performer), 479 Aladdin (film), 439 Alcorn, Al, xiii, 42–43, 45, 52, 54, 67, 72, 74, 195 Ali, Muhammad, 307 Alinsangan, Susan, 391 Allchin, Jim, 403 Allen, Gary, 376 Allen, Paul, 59, 61 Allen, Tim, 432 Allen, Woody, 429 All One Farm (commune), 39, 50, 53, 59, 63, 103 All Things Digital conference, 463 “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (Brautigan), 57 Alps Electronics Co., 146–47 Altair (personal computer), 59, 173 Alto (computer), 95 Amazon, 410, 531, 533 Kindle of, 503, 534 SJ on, 503–4 Amelio, Gil, xiii, 296–97, 327, 332, 335, 336, 341 Apple-NeXT deal and, 299–303 Macworld gaffe of, 307–8, 339 media and, 311–12 Newton crisis and, 309, 338 ouster of, 305–15, 324, 326 ship parable of, 310 SJ’s first meeting with, 297–98, 304, 316–17 American Express, 410 Ames, Roger, 398–99, 401, 402 Ames Research Center, 8–9 Anderson, Fred, 313, 316, 317, 332, 349, 459 backdated stock options controversy and, 450–51 Angelou, Maya, 330 “Annie” skunkworks project, 94, 109 Ansen, David, 290 “Antennagate,” 519–23 Antz (film), 427–30 Anywhere but Here (Simpson), 4, 254–55 AOL, 502 AOL Time Warner, 394–95, 398, 407 Apollo 13 (film), 290 Appel, Richard, 250, 274, 548 Apple Computer Co., 54, 90, 132, 207, 239, 295, 306–7, 308, 317–22, 394–95, 409, 512 Adobe and, 514–16 Apple Corps lawsuits against, 419–20, 523–24 applications controlled by, 516–17 art-technology connection and, 526–27 badge controversy in, 83 Blue Box and creation of, 27–30 business plan of, 76–77 collaborative culture of, 362–63 Cook Doctrine and, 488 Cook’s role in, 360–61 design mantra of, 127 design philosophy of, 344–45 design studio of, 345–47 desktop concept and, 98–99 desktop publishing and, 295–96 incorporation of, 77–78 Intel chips adopted by, 446–48 IPO of, 102–4 logo of, xviii, 68–69, 79–80 Macintosh deal and, 324–25 Microsoft out-competed by, 562–63 motto of, 69 name of, 63 NeXT and, 213–15, 217–18, 221–22, 298–300, 305–6 original partnership of, 63–66, 73 origins of, 61–63 product review process of, 336–39 products of, 565–66 retreats of, 142–45, 147, 154–55, 175, 398–99 Sculley’s reorganization of, 205–7 showcase headquarters of, 534–35 SJ as interim CEO of, 332–33, 364–65, 367 SJ ousted from, xvii–xviii, 202–6, 215–16, 217 SJ’s aesthetic and, 126–27 SJ-Scott dispute in, 83–84 SJ’s resignations from, 215–16, 217, 303–4, 557–59, 563–64 SJ’s return to, 306–8, 317–21 stock options controversy and, 365–66, 448–51, 477 turnover of board of, 318–20 uniforms idea and, 361–62 Wozniak’s departure from, 192–93 Xerox “raided” by, 96–97, 98 Apple Corps, 419–20, 523–24 Apple Foundation, 263 Apple I computer, 56, 63, 66, 163 early competition to, 69–70 first sales order for, 66–68 Wozniak and, 60–61, 67–68, 534 Apple II computer, 91, 93, 94, 109, 114, 125, 137, 138, 154, 173, 189, 192, 200, 207, 565 brochures of, 79–80 capitalization of, 72, 75, 77 circuit board of, 74–75 Commodore company and, 72–73 launch of, 80–81 Markkula and, 80–81 packaging of, 73–74 PC sales and, 160 peripherals and, 74–75 power supply of, 84, 146 sales of, 84, 92, 160 SJ’s vision of, 71–72 Snow White ad for, 132–33 VisiCalc feature of, 84 warranty of, 84 Wozniak and, 80–81, 84–85, 92, 534, 562 Apple III computer, 92–94, 154 failure of, 92–93, 160 AppleLabs, 196–98, 203, 204–6 “Apple Marketing Philosophy, The” (Markkula), 78 Apple products, see individual product names Apple Stores, 368–77, 368, 461, 470, 472, 566 checkout design of, 372 on Fifth Avenue, 376–77, 514 first opening of, 374 floors of, 375 Gap and, 370 genius bar in, 375–76 minimalist nature of, 370 product organization in, 372–74 prototypes of, 371–74 staircases of, 375 success of, 374, 376 Apple University, 461 Arab Spring, 258 Architectural Digest, 276 ARM architecture, 492–93 Arnold Worldwide, 328 Aspen Institute, xvii, 126 Associated Press, 293 AT&T, 27, 136, 521 Atari, 42–45, 52, 53, 57, 63, 72, 74, 81, 217 SJ hired by, 83–84 Atkinson, Bill, xiii, 93–94, 95, 96–97, 99, 101, 110, 111, 113, 117, 118, 122–23, 128–32, 134, 144, 179, 181, 207, 385, 470, 474, 555 Lisa Computer and, 99–101 overlapping windows concept of, 100, 323 QuickDraw program of, 169–70, 180 SJ’s worldview described by, 119–20 Atom (microchip), 492 Augmentation Research Center, 57 Auletta, Ken, 256 Autobiography of a Yogi (Yogananda), 35, 46–47, 527 Avon, 321, 481 Axelrod, David, 497, 547 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 413 Badu, Erykah, 479 Baez, Joan, 57, 153, 168, 261, 269, 412, 415 SJ’s romance with, 250–53 Ballmer, Steve, 375, 474, 569 Bank of America, 83 Barnes, Susan, 204, 212, 216 Barnicle, Mike, 312 Barrett, Craig, 448 Bartz, Carol, 545 BASIC (computer language), 59, 61, 66, 84, 94, 173, 174–75 Batman Forever (film), 290 Bauhaus movement, 126, 265, 372 Baum, Allen, 26, 60, 67, 77 Bay, Willow, 438 Bayer, Herbert, 126, 127 Beatles, 402, 412–13, 415, 418–19, 570 in move to iTunes, 523–24 Beauty and the Beast (film), 439 Beck, Glenn, 508 Be company, 297–301 Be Here Now (Ram Dass), 34, 37, 52 Belleville, Bob, 99, 145–47, 190, 200, 204 Bellini, Mario, 126 Bell Labs, 9 Bell System Technical Manual, 27–28 Berg, Paul, 211–12 Berkeley Barb, 61 Bertelsmann, 395 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 126 Betrayal (Pinter), 204 Bewkes, Jeff, 506–7 Bezos, Jeff, 503 Big Mac (computer), 212, 214 Billboard, 418, 423 bitmapping concept, 95, 97, 111 BlackBerry, 469 Black Eyed Peas, 392, 413 Black-Scholes valuation, 449 Blade Runner (film), 163 Blood on the Tracks (Dylan), 52, 208, 412 Bloomberg News, 479, 497 Blue Box design, 27–30, 73 SJ-Wozniak partnership and, 29–30 Blue Van, 498 Bob Dylan (Dylan), 412 Bohlin, Peter, 430 Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, 375 Bohr, Niels, 171 Boich, Mike, 177 Boing Boing, 563 Bono, 58, 180, 402, 406, 411, 424, 459–60 iPod deal and, 420–23 “Book of Macintosh, The” (Raskin), 109 Boston Globe, 312 “Both Sides Now” (song), 414 Bourke-White, Margaret, 330 Bourne Ultimatum, The (film), 527 Bowers, Ann, 121, 537 Brand, Stewart, 58–59 Brandenburg Concertos (Bach), 413 Braun company, 132, 343 Brautigan, Richard, 57 Breaking Away (film), 126 Breakout (game), 118 Brennan, Chrisann, xiii, 5, 31–32, 41, 49, 86, 103, 104, 119, 257, 259, 265, 279, 280–81, 486 pregnancy of, 88–90 SJ’s relationship with, 86–91 Brennan-Jobs, Lisa, xiii, 90, 140, 256, 257, 270, 542 Mona Simpson and, 282 SJ’s relationship with, 259–61, 265, 266, 278–81, 315, 486, 542, 551–52 Brilliant, Larry, 47, 106, 453 Brin, Sergey, 511–12 Brother Bear (film), 437 Brown, Bryar, 477, 549 Brown, John Seeley, 471 Brown, Tim, 32 “Brown Eyed Girl” (song), 411 Buffalo Springfield, 413 Buffett, Warren, 442 Bug’s Life, A (film), 427–30 Bumiller, Elisabeth, 411–12 Burge, Frank, 79 Burroughs company, 20 Burton, Bill, 497 Bush, George H.

Pocket Rough Guide Barcelona (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Mar 2019

There’s also contemporary tapas and platillos (little plates) but it’s a bar first and foremost, with DJs cracking out house and techno sets at the weekend. Vinil MAP. C/Matilde 2 Diagonal 669 177 945. Mon–Wed 9pm–2am, Thu 9pm–2.30am, Fri & Sat 9pm–3.30am. Wear a beret, surgically attached to your iPad? Favour Blade Runner, Jeff Buckley and Band of Horses? This bar’s for you – a dive bar with the lighting set at perpetual dusk, where time slips easily away. Virreina MAP Pl. de la Virreina 1 Fontana 932 379 880. Mon–Fri 9am–1am, Sat 10am–2am, Sun 10am–midnight. Another real Gràcia favourite, on one of the neighbourhood’s prettiest squares, with a very popular summer terrassa.

California
by Sara Benson
Published 15 Oct 2010

* * * ‘The Industry’ has been based in California ever since The Jazz Singer premiered in downtown LA in 1927, ushering in the era of ‘talkies’ and Hollywood’s Golden Age. In movies California has also played against type, diverging from kooky, sunny backdrop in Steve Martin’s LA Story to brooding main character in such acclaimed noirs as LA Confidential, Chinatown and Blade Runner. Today, the high cost of filming in Los Angeles has sent location scouts beyond the studio-packed San Fernando Valley to Canada. With a few bikinis and fake palms Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal double as iconic Southern Californian locations. * * * TOP 10 FILMS ABOUT CALIFORNIA The Maltese Falcon (1941) John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, the classic San Francisco private eye.

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The Graduate (1967) Dustin Hoffman flees status-obsessed California suburbia to search for meaning, heading across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley (in the wrong direction). Harold and Maude (1971) The ultimate May to December romance features the eternal spring of the Conservatory of Flowers and the fabulous ruins of the Sutro Baths. Chinatown (1974) Roman Polanski’s gripping version of the early-20th-century water wars that made and nearly broke LA. Blade Runner (1982) Ridley Scott’s sci-fi cyberpunk thriller projects LA into the 21st century, with high-rise corporate fortresses and chaotic streets. The Player (1992) Directed by Robert Altman and starring Tim Robbins, this satire on the Industry features dozens of cameos by actors spoofing themselves.

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Southeast of the plaza looms the soaring tower of Union Station (Map; 800 N Alameda St), built in 1939, the last of the grand railroad stations in the USA. It’s a glamorous exercise in Spanish-Mission and art deco, and has a waiting room easily the size of a football field with the loftiness of a cathedral. The station has appeared in dozens of movies, including Guilty by Suspicion, Blade Runner, The Way We Were and Catch Me if You Can. The terminal stands on the spot of LA’s original Chinatown, whose residents were relocated a few blocks north, along Broadway and Hill St. Today, the ‘new’ Chinatown is still a cultural and social hub of LA’s Chinese-Americans. In recent years, artists and hipsters have moved in to open galleries and eclectic stores in the historic Central Plaza (Map; N Broadway), in the 900 block between Broadway and Hill St, and on nearby Chung King Rd.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

These robot hunters will be specifically designed to have superior speed, strength, and coordination in order to capture errant robots. They will be designed to understand the weak points of any robotic system and how they behave under certain conditions. Human can also be trained in this skill. In the movie Blade Runner, a specially trained cadre of agents, including one played by Harrison Ford, are skilled in the techniques necessary to neutralize any rogue robot. Since it will take many decades of hard work for robots to slowly go up the evolutionary scale, it will not be a sudden moment when humanity is caught off guard and we are all shepherded into zoos like cattle.

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See Robotics/­AI Artificial vision Artsutanov, Yuri ASIMO robot, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 Asimov, Isaac, 2.­1, 6.­1, 8.­1 ASPM gene Asteroid landing Atala, Anthony Atomic force microscope Augmented reality Augustine Commission report, 6.­1, 6.­2 Avatar (movie), 1.­1, 2.­1, 6.­1, 7.­1 Avatars Backscatter X-­rays Back to the Future movies, 5.­1, 5.­2 Badylak, Stephen Baldwin, David E.­ Baltimore, David, 1.­1, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 Benford, Gregory Big bang research Binnig, Gerd Bioinformatics Biotechnology. See Medicine/­biotechnology Birbaumer, Niels Birth control Bismarck, Otto von Blade Runner (movie) Blue Gene computer Blümich, Bernhard, 1.­1, 1.­2 Boeing Corporation Booster-­rocket technologies Bova, Ben, 5.­1, 5.­2 Boys from Brazil, The (movie) Brain artificial body parts, adaptation to basic structure of emotions and growing a human brain Internet contact lenses and locating every neuron in as neural network parallel processing in reverse engineering of simulations of “­Brain drain”­ to the United States BrainGate device Brain injuries, treatment for Branson, Richard Brave New World (Huxley) Breast cancer Breazeal, Cynthia Brenner, Sydney Brooks, Rodney, 2.­1, 2.­2, 4.­1 Brown, Dan Brown, Lester Buckley, William F.­

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

Source: events.airforce.com. 94 Turse, The Complex, 144. 95 Monbiot, ‘Driving into the Abyss’. 96 Turse, The Complex, 146. 97 Monbiot, ‘Driving into the Abyss’. 98 Campbell, ‘The Biopolitics of Security’, 943. 99 Aaron Naparstek, ‘The Ford Blade Runner’, 22 January 2005, available at www.naparstek.com. 100 Phil Patton, ‘Sports Cars with Promises to Keep’, New York Times, 16 January 2005. 101 Quoted in Naparstek, ‘The Ford Blade Runner’. 102 Ibid. 103 Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 104 James Hom blog, 28 November 2006. 105 National Public Radio, ‘Iraq Cancels Blackwater’s Operating License’, 17 August 2007, available at www.npr.org. 106 Ibid. 107 Mark Frauenfelder, ‘Amazing Mad Max Vehicles in Iraq, BoingBoing.net, 1 June 2006. 108 Todd Lappin, Amazing Mad Max Vehicles in Iraq’, available at digg.com/mods/Amazing_Mad_Max_vehicles_in_Iraq_. 109 See ‘Mad Max at the Walmart parking lot’, http://digg.com/d11W1D. 110 Jeremy Packer, ‘Becoming Bombs: Mobilizing Mobility in The War Of Terror’, Cultural Studies 20: 4–5, 2006, 385. 111 Ibid., 386. 112 Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, London: Verso, 2007. 113 Packer, ‘Becoming Bombs’, 380. 114 Ibid. 115 Peter Weibel, ‘Jordan Crandall: Art and the Cinematographic Imaginary in the Age of Panoptic Data Processing’, in Jordan Crandall, ed., Drive, Graz: Neue Gallerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, 2000, 8. 116 Here we confront the latest in a long-standing series of attempts to remodel car and road cultures to address the alleged imperatives of national security.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

UNSHACKLING FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER In the Terminator movies, when the military AI Skynet becomes self-aware, it decides humans are a threat to its existence and starts a global nuclear war. Terminator follows in a long tradition of science fiction creations turning on their masters. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Harrison Ford plays a cop tasked with hunting down psychopathic synthetic humans called “replicants.” In Harlan Ellison’s 1967 short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” a military supercomputer exterminates all of humanity save for five survivors, whom it imprisons underground and tortures for eternity.

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Patriot, 165–66 and complex systems, 156–59 and “moral buffer,” 277 role in accidents, 155–56 automation bias, 144–45, 170, 278–79, 324–25 automobiles autonomous features, 28 self-driving, 28, 31–32, 147, 217, 277 Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System (AACUS) helicopter, 17 autonomous cyberweapons, 222–30 autonomous machines, 31f, 32–33 autonomous navigation, autonomous targeting vs., 123–24 autonomous swarms, 11–13 autonomous targeting, 116, 123–24, 187 autonomous weapons, 130–33 accountability gap, 258–63 antipersonnel weapons, 71, 355–56, 403n arms race in, 117–19 authorization of, 89–101 automatic weapons as predecessor to, 37–38 bans of antipersonnel weapons, 355–56 basics, 35–56 Brimstone missile, 105–8 and communications disruption, 303–4, 328 complete ban of, 352–55 consequences of, 272 cyber warfare, 211–30 danger of delegating authority to, 192–95, 192f destructive potential of out-of-control logarithms, 207–10 early history, 35–40 ethical issues, 6–8, 271–96 experimental programs, 59–77 FLA as step towards, 70 flash wars, 229–30 as fundamentally inhuman, 285–87 future of, 54–56, 96–99 ground combat robots, 111–17 hacking of, 246–47 human dignity and, 287–90 human role in deployment, 52–53; see also human judgment inevitability of accidents, 175–79 laws of war and, 251–70 legal status, 258–59 limitations, 53–54 limited autonomy of homing munitions, 42 LRASM designation, 63–65, 68 mines, 50–51 outside of U.S., 102–19 PGMs, 40–41 potential for behaving more ethically than humans, 279–84 potential to be more humane than conventional weapons, 6 potential to inflame crises, 317–18 problems inherent in banning of, 346–53 regulation, see arms control risk of failure, 189–95 “rules of the road” treaties, 356–57 Samsung SGR-A1 robot, 104–5 secret development of, 8 stability and, 297–318 swarms, 11–13 autonomous weapon systems, 44–45 defined, 44 failures in, 137–60 fully autonomous systems, 46–50 human intervention and risks, 147–49 supervised, see supervised autonomous weapon systems unanticipated consequences of failures, 145–47 autonomy dimensions of, 27–33 evolution of, 14–23 and human-machine relationship, 28–30 autonomy (continued) importance to robots, 15 and intelligence, 28–33 intelligence vs., 50 and jammed communication channels, 15–16 limits to, 23–25 and personnel costs, 16 and swarming, 17–23 task dimension of, 28 theoretical basics, 26–34 B-52 bomber, 174 B-59 (Soviet submarine), 311, 318 BAE Systems, 108–9 ballistic missiles, 40–41, 139, 141–43 Ballmer, Steve, 241 Bandar Abbas airport (Iran), 169 bandwidth, 327–28 Barksdale Air Force Base, 174 Basic Ai Drives, The (Omohundro), 237–38 Bat radar-guided anti-ship bomb, 96 battle damage assessment (BDA), 55 battle network, 43–44 Battlestar Galactica (film), 223 Belfiore, Michael, 76 Berman, Greg, 207 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), 344 Black Monday market crash (1987), 199, 206 Blade Runner (film), 234 bombing raids, aerial, 275–76, 278, 341–42 Boomerang shot detection system, 113 bordeebook (online bookseller), 205 Borrie, John on incidents of mass lethality, 193 on risks of autonomous weapons, 150–51, 158 on system accidents, 189 on unanticipated failures, 154 on unintended lethal effects, 351 Bostrom, Nick, 237, 239 botnets, 212 Boyd, John, 23–24 Breakout (video game), 248 Brimstone missile, 105–8, 117, 326, 353 Bringsjord, Selmer, 245 brinksmanship, 207–8 brittleness, 145–47 and accidents, 155 and adversary innovation, 177–78 and counter-autonomy, 221 in neural networks, 182 in stock trading algorithms, 204 Brizzolara, Bob, 22 Brumley, David, 217, 219–22 on dangers of AI, 246 on ecosystem of autonomous systems, 247 on fear of AI, 241 on future of U.S. cybersecurity, 226–27 on introspective systems, 226 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 173 bullets, expanding, 343 Bush, George H.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

Here, much oil is burned and much carbon emitted yet these places are simultaneously paragons of efficiency, extracting value from every drop poured into the pipework. And sometimes, especially at night when their lights twinkle and the sky is lit by occasional flares of gas from the chimneys, these places have a kind of glistening beauty to them – a little like the opening scene of Blade Runner , in which the camera flies over the chimneys of a dystopic Los Angeles. As it happens, the film’s director Ridley Scott said the tracking shot was inspired by his memories of sitting on the hills overlooking Teesside, looking out over the chemical works and refinery as they belched flames into the sky.

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Ltd) 13 , 402 , 406 , 407 , 408 , 409 , 410 , 421 caustic soda 152 , 153 , 190 , 263n CCS see carbon capture and storage celluloid 356 Celtic tribes/Celts 144 , 146–7 , 161 , 259 , 266 cement 9 , 41 , 71–2 , 73 , 75–9 , 84 , 100 , 115 , 340 and carbon emissions 81 , 82–5 Portland 75 , 80 , 83 , 84 , 85 see also concrete CFCs see chlorofluorocarbons Chalcolithic period 258 chalcopyrite 294 , 304 chalk 73 , 76 , 81 Challenger , HMS 291 , 292 , 301 Chañaral, Chile 273 Chance Brothers, Smethwick 48 , 52 , 55 Chang, Morris 108 , 116 charcoal 218 , 219 , 220 , 222 Charles I, of England 165 cheese/cheesemaking 128–9 , 131 , 132 , 134 , 190 , 353 chert 233 Cheshire fertiliser plants 10 salt industry 143 , 145–51 , 154–5 , 157 , 158–62 , 177 , 180 , 183 , 184 , 206 , 219 , 395 see also Imperial Chemical Industries Chevron (company) 309 Chile 371 , 391–3 , 396 copper production 259 , 261 , 288 , 301 ; see also Chuquicamata and deep-sea mining 301 iodine 176 lithium production 384 , 385 , 391–3 , 395 ; see also Salar de Atacama nitrates industry 170–73 , 174–6 , 393 saltpetre 175–6 , see also Saltpetre War see also Antofagasta China/Chinese 37 , 65 , 95 , 119 , 120 , 135–6 , 235 , 236 , 396 ballpoint pens manufacturing 229–30 battery production 406 , 407 , 409–10 , see also CATL coal-fired power stations 363 concrete 80 , 85 copper smelting and refining 261 , 267 , 269 and deep-sea mining 297 , 298 Discourse on Salt and Iron 137 , 191 electric cars 404 explosives 120 , 168 famine 205 Guanzi 136 iodine deficiency 137–8 iron and steel industry 203 , 205 , 207 , 213 , 217 , 218 , 229 , 231 , 244 , 247 lithium 385 plastic 359 recycling batteries 421–2 salt lakes 385 salt making 147 , 313 salt monopoly 135 , 136–8 saltpetre 164 and sand mining 69–70 silicon chip production 34 , 99 , 104–5 , 106 , 114–16 skyscrapers 78 , 79–80 , 234 smartphones 92 and USA 104 , 115 , 205 , 207 , 411 China National Salt Industry Corporation 138 Chincha Islands 165–7 , 172 , 275 , 298–9 chloralkali process 151–3 , 156 , 190 , 395 chlorine/chlorine gas 128 , 152 , 153 , 157 , 174 , 263n , 390 , 428 , 433 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) 318 , 341n chlorophyll 166 , 349 chloroquine 152 chromium 21 , 225 , 277–8 Chuquicamata, Chile 265–6 , 269–71 , 304 , 305 copper mine 171 , 266–7 , 268 , 269 , 270 , 271–2 , 273 , 274 , 280 , 281–3 , 284 , 285 , 288 , 294 , 304 , 305 , 327 tailings dam (Talabre) 272–3 Clarion-Clipperton Zone (Pacific Ocean) 293 , 294 , 298 , 302 Clayton, Pat 30 , 31 Cleopatra Beach, Anatolia 32 Cleveland Potash (company) 180–81 polyhalite mining 181–7 Climafuel 82 climate change 15 , 65 , 66 , 81–6 , 305 , 311 see also carbon emissions clingfilm 354 Club of Rome 276 , 294 The Limits to Growth 276 , 277 , 279–80 , 286 , 321 Clydach, Wales: nickel refinery 261 coal 15 , 16 , 20 , 22 , 82 , 196 , 198 , 215 , 216 , 219–22 , 228 , 268n , 317 , 319 , 334 , 363 , 434 coal-powered machinery 202 , 257 see also coke coal ships 219–20 cobalt 15 , 17 , 21 , 149 , 253 , 411 , 412 , 415–16 , 417 , 419 , 443 in batteries 408 , 409 , 416 sub-sea 293 , 294 , 300 Cochrane, Lord Thomas 265 Codelco (company) 13 , 270 , 283 coke/coking coal 95 , 215 , 219 , 220 , 222 , 311 , 353 , 433–4 needle coke 331–2 , 382 ovens 210 , 213 , 222 , 231 , 332 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 139 Compass Minerals (company) 158 , 159 computer chips 8 , 90 , 91 , 93 , 107 , 116 , 118 , 203 , 230 , 411 Intel 90 , 112 see also silicon chips computers 9 , 34 , 37–8 , 90 , 91 , 117 , 119 , 274 , 426–7 concrete 6 , 8 , 40 , 41 , 67 , 71 , 72–4 , 75 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 377 , 425 , 429 , 442 and climate change 81–6 reinforced (‘rebar’) 81 , 198 Roman 75 , 85 , 340 and water 84 Concretene 84 Condori, Pamela 388–9 Confucius 137 , 275 Congo, Democratic Republic of 413–14 , 415 cobalt 149 , 293 , 294 , 415–16 copper 268 , 415 Kamoa-Kakula mine 304 Katanga mines 415–18 , 420 Union Minière du Haut-Katanga 415–18 uranium mine 415 Cook, Captain James 220 copper 7 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 170 , 171 , 182 , 243 , 253–4 , 258 , 277–8 , 279–80 , 287–9 , 303–5 , 373 , 377 , 416 , 417 , 429 , 437 , 441 and bronze 258–9 cathodes 267 and n , 284 , 285 , 392 ‘concentrate’ 267 and electricity 6 , 22 , 89 , 253 , 254–5 , 256–8 , 263 , 264 , 287–9 electrolysed 262–3 , 267n , 285 heap leaching 272 , 303 and magnets 254 mining 258 , 259 , see also Chuquicamata peak 280 , 285 , 294 recycled 420 reserves 285–6 resources 286 smelting and refining 260–61 , 267 sub-sea reserves 293 , 294 , 295 , 296 , 300 telephone wires 60 trade 259–61 in turbines 257 and waste 287 , 300 , 304 Copper Age 258 ‘Copper man’ 266 , 280 Corning (company) 8 , 9 , 59 , 61 Cornucopians 276 , 279 Cornwall: copper and tin mining 259 , 260 , 280 , 437 Corran ferry, Scotland 42 Corran Narrows, Scotland 57 Cort, Henry 220 Cortez gold mine, Nevada 1 , 2–5 , 13 , 267 , 269 , 272 COVID-19 8 , 9 , 20 , 91 , 211 , 319 , 358 Crete: salt 133 Crookes, Sir William 172 cucumbers, growing 346 cyanide 2 , 3 Cyprus 133 , 258 , 278 Czochralski, Jan 102n Czochralski (CZ) process 101–4 , 105 , 107 , 119 , 327 Damascus, Syria: swords 200 Darby, Abraham 220 Davy, Humphry 262 Debruyne, Stefan 391 deep-sea mining 292–303 , 420 deep-sea species 301 Deere, John 202 deforestation 81 , 131 , 147 , 205 , 218 , 247 , 248 , 275 , 293 , 311 , 315 detergents 152 , 153 , 354 Dharasana saltworks, India 142 diazomethane 350 diesel 331 , 345 dinosaurs 27 , 43 dishwasher salt 146 Dogger Bank/Doggerland 74 dolomite 215 , 233 Donetsk, Ukraine 206 Dorador, Cristina 392–3 Dow (company) 155 drugs/medicines/pharmaceuticals 1 , 8 , 9 , 56 , 127 , 150–51 , 152 , 155 , 156 , 176 , 179 , 190 , 191 , 238 , 334 , 344 , 345 , 357 , 376 , 428 , 429 , 440 Dubai 64 , 65 , 66 , 74 , 266 dyes 218 , 219 , 220 , 334 , 345 dynamite 168 East India Company, British 165 economics/economists 1 , 5 , 6–7 , 10–11 , 14 , 17 , 19–20 , 36 , 52 , 56 , 82 , 120 , 204 , 218n , 227–8 , 255 , 256 , 273–80 , 319–20 , 335 , 365 , 367 , 420 , 423 , 424 , 428 , 438–9 Economist, The 149–50 , 324 Edison, Thomas 76 , 77 , 262 , 263–4 , 279 , 288 , 377 , 378–9 , 380 Egyptians, ancient: mummification 312 Ehrlich, Paul 274 , 275 , 276–9 , 284 , 285 , 304 , 326 The Population Bomb 274–5 , 276 , 277 Eiffel, Gustav 200 , 201n Eiffel Tower, Paris 200–1 Einstein, Albert 21 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 336 electric vehicles (EVs) 400–1 see also cars, electric electricity 7 , 21 , 22 , 37 , 53 , 89 , 97 , 251–3 , 255–7 , 305 , 377–8 , 431 , 435 alternating currents 264 and copper 6 , 22 , 89 , 253 , 254–5 , 256–8 , 263 , 264 , 287–9 and light 255 and motors 21 , 256 and polyethylene insulation 351–3 sub-sea cables 434 see also batteries ; electric vehicles electrolysis 262–3 and n , 267n , 432 electromagnetism 151–2 , 254 , 262 electrowinning 284 , 303 Elkem (company) 96 Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto 276 engines, combustion 317–18 Enlightenment, the 37 epoxy resin 355–6 Epsom salts 178 Espindola, Christian 389 Esso 380 ethane 315 ethylene 344 , 351 , 357 , 358 EUV see extreme ultraviolet EV Group 119 Evans, Joe 145 , 146 EVs see electric vehicles explosives 168 , 169 , 170 , 173 , 188 extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light 112–14 , 116 , 442 ExxonMobil 380 Fairchild Semiconductor 89 , 112 Faraday, Michael 37 , 53 , 257 , 262 Fawcett, Eric 351 , 352 , 358 Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia (FCAB) 163–4 Ferroglobe (company) 95 , 97 fertilisers 10 , 20 , 22 , 61 , 201 , 203 , 311 , 344 , 345 ammonia 188 , 432 caliche 375 , 430 green 432 , 434 guano 166–7 , 275 , 299 from natural gas 348–9 , 430 nitrate/nitrogen 166 , 170 , 172 , 173–4 , 176 , 275 , 299 , 348–9 polyhalite 181–2 , 187 potash 179 shortage of 180 fibre optics 7 , 8 , 425 fibreglass 8 , 248 , 356 Fiji 301 Finland concrete towers 83 copper mine 182 fish, deep-sea 301 flak jackets 354 flavourings 345 Fletcher, Seth 373 Floyd, George 414 fluorine 52 flux 39 , 56–7 , 153 , 190 , 215 , 429 Fontainebleau, France: silver sands 42 , 56 , 66 Ford, Henry 226–7 , 281 , 405 , 421 , 427 , 428 Model Ts 227 Forest of Dean 218n Förstemann, Robert 256 Forth Bridge, Scotland 200 , 201 ‘fossil deposits’ 68 fossil fuels 6 , 15 , 16 , 20 , 22 , 317 , 319 , 328 , 399 , 430 building with 433–4 see also coal ; oil ; gas , natural Foxconn (Hon Hai Technology Group) (company) 118 , 119 fracking 322–5 , 365 France 57 , 129 , 174 , 221–2 , 414 and deep-sea mining 298 , 301 and glass and optical aids 35 , 48 salt 130 , 138–9 , 140 , 147 , 154 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria 47 , 48 Friedland, Robert 253 , 304 Friedman, Milton 11 Fuding, China: battery factory see CATL fulgurites 31 Gait, Paul 284 Galápagos Rift 291 Galileo Galilei 36 Gandhi, Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) 140–42 , 147 , 155 Ganges, River 165 Gary, Indiana: US Steel 208 gas 198 , 257 , 313 liquefied 364 natural 7 , 10 , 22 , 313 , 315 , 318 , 321–2 , 348–9 , 363–7 , 429 , 430 , 434 gasoline see petrol GDP see gross domestic product GEM (company) 421–2 General Electric (company) 257 General Motors (GM) 340–41 , 407 generators 255 , 257 , 262 , 263 , 264 , 273 , 279 , 284 , 288 , 377 , 433 Genoa, Italy Giorgio Bridge 210 Morandi Bridge 81 geothermal plants 257 germanium 89 , 100 , 117 , 262 , 416 Germans/Germany 28–9 , 47 , 152 , 173 , 174 , 196 , 256 , 259 , 298 , 350 , 365 , 414 , 438 cement 76 , 77 coal 334 and explosives 173 , 174 and fertilisers 172–4 glass and optical devices 48–50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55–6 , 93 , 381 iron and steel 225 , 230 , 231 , 365 and oil 333 , 335–9 ; see also Wesseling potash production 56–7 , 180 salt 98 , 132 , 139 , 147 silicon chips 96 , 97–8 , 103 , 113 silver sands 42 Ghawar oil field, Saudi Arabia 314–17 , 320 , 321 , 322 , 323 , 324 , 325 , 326 , 329 , 358 , 362 , 364 , 366 Gibson, Reginald 351 , 352 , 358 Gigafactory Nevada 399–400 , 403–4 , 405 , 406–7 , 408 , 422 Gilf Kebir, Egypt: Palaeozoic sandstones 31 Glasgow 156 glass/glassmaking 8 , 9 , 21 , 31 , 35 , 36–7 , 46–7 , 51 , 52–3 , 54 , 127 , 219 , 426 , 429 , 440 borosilicate 8–9 , 11 , 48 fibreglass 8 flint (lead crystal) 53–4 and fluxes 39 , 56 , 153 , 190 , 215 , 429 German see under Germans/Germany inventing/making 38–41 lead borosilicate 53 Libyan desert 30 , 31 , 33 and lithium 376–7 and refractive indices 53–4 silica 59 and soda ash 154 soda-lime (crown) 39 , 54 stained-glass windows 39–40 structure of 39–40 and taxes 55 , 56 glasshouses/greenhouses 36 , 347–8 , 349–50 Global Battery Alliance 420–21 global warming 315 , 318 , 340 , 430–31 , see also greenhouse gases GM see General Motors gneiss 43 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 56 gold/gold mining 1–2 , 182 , 243 , 268n , 269 , 279–80 , 416 , 419 sub-sea 293 see also Cortez gold mine Goldman Sachs 253 Gondwana 94 Goodenough, John B. 381–2 , 383 , 408 Google 115 graphene 443 Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, Manchester 84 graphite 353 , 382 , 409 , 411 , 433 , 434 Grasberg mine, New Guinea 283–4 gravel 8 , 73 , 74 , 94 , 198 Great Glen Fault, Scotland 42–3 , 57 Great Sand Sea, Sahara 28–30 , 31 , 66 meteor strike 27 , 30 , 43 , 59 greenhouse gases 19 , 81 , 161 , 204 , 217 , 311 , 385 , 399 , 435 greenhouses see glasshouses Gromort, Georges 71 gross domestic product (GDP) 7 , 14 , 16 , 52 , 88 , 197 , 203 , 224 , 439 Grozny oilfield, Russia 337 Guan Zhong 136 guano 166–7 , 275 , 299 Guano Islands Act (1856) 299 Guérande, the, France: salt 130n Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 281 Guggenheim, Daniel 171 , 174 Guggenheim, Harry 171 Guggenheims, the 281 Guinea: iron ore 247 gunpowder 164 gunsights 46 , 47 , 48 , 50 gutta-percha 352 , 356 Haber, Fritz 173 , 174 , 334 Haber-Bosch process 173–4 , 176 , 188 , 204 , 275 , 342 , 351 , 430 , 432 , 438 Haiti: 2010 earthquake 80 halite 146 , 155 , 161 , 178 , 181 , 191 , 312 Hallein salt mine, Austria 144 , 161 , 266 Hamersley Range, Australia 235–7 , 238 Brockman 4 (mine) 238–40 see also Juukan Gorge Hancock, Lang 235–6 , 237 Haradh, Saudi Arabia 309–10 Harcourt, William Vernon 52–3 , 55 Hartcup, Guy 51 Haus, Reiner 96 , 106 Hawaii 32 , 130n Hawthorne, Nevada 410 , 412 heap leaching 272 , 303 hematite 234 , 236 , 238 , 247 Herbert, Frank 136 Herodotus 29 Heywood, Chris 158–9 , 160–61 Hicks, George 169 Highways England 126 Himalayan (Khewra) salt 130n , 144 , 182 Hinkley Point C, Somerset 257 hip replacements 354 Hitler, Adolf 335–6 , 337 , 339 Hittites: metalwork 199–200 , 217 Hoboken, Antwerp: Umicore 418–19 , 434 Hockney, David 37 Hooke, Robert 36 , 37 Hoover, President Herbert 224 Hoover Dam, Nevada 73 , 80 Hornsea One, North Sea 432 Hoshine (company) 104 Houthi rebels 363 Howes, Anton 89 Howland Island 299 Huan of Qi, Duke 136 Huáscar (ship) 170 Hughes, John James 206 Hula Hoops 353 Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World 188 , 432 Hyde, James Franklin 59 , 61 hydrothermal vents 15–16 , 292 , 315 , 316 , 365 see also coal ; oil ; gas hydroelectric dams 257 , 263 , 373 hydrogen 152 , 157 , 161 , 166 , 173 , 246 , 335 , 343 , 348 , 349 , 350 , 354 , 431–2 hydrogen chloride 98 , 120–21 , 190 , 428–9 , 442 hydrogenation 335 , 336 , 337–8 , 339 hydroponics 346–7 hydrothermal vents (‘black smokers’) 291 , 294 , 295n , 297 , 301 , 302 hypochlorite 153 Ibiza: saltmaking 130 , 133 , 376 IBM (company) 117–18 Ibn Saud, King Abdul Aziz 362 ICI see Imperial Chemical Industries IG Farben (company) 335 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) 151 , 155 , 184 , 187 , 188 , 335 , 351 , 352 , 353 , 357 , 358 , 426 , 432 IMS Nanofabrication 119 Incas 166 , 167 India salt production 139–42 saltpetre 165 ‘sand mafias’ 70 indium 443 Indonesia 10 , 66 , 66 , 221 , 267 , 283 , 293 industrial revolution 18 , 36 , 153 , 156 , 219 , 317 Ineos (company) 151 Inovyn (company) 151 insulation, electrical 351–3 , 356 Intel (company) 90 , 91 , 114 , 115 , 118 International Ocean Discovery Programme (IODP): Atlantis Massif mission 292 International Seabed Authority (ISA) 296–8 , 299 , 301 , 302 International Space Station 59 internet, the 7 , 8 , 37 , 59 , 60 , 115 , 211 iodates 168 iodine 137–8 , 176 iPhones 274 Iran 313 , 322 , 362 , 363 , 364 , 365 Iraq 313 iron/iron mining 15 , 16 , 17 , 20 , 22 , 46 , 67 , 99 , 125 , 137 , 156 , 195–8 , 199 , 200 and n , 201 , 203 , 205–6 , 213 , 217–21 , 243 , 278 cast iron 199 , 202 pig iron 199 , 215 , 216 and n , 218 , 220 , 222–3 wrought iron 199 , 200 , 201n , 228 see also Mariupol ; Port Talbot ; steel ; and below Iron Age 18 , 125 , 126 , 127 , 218 iron ores 184 , 198–9 , 206 , 208 , 210 , 216 , 232 , 235 , 245 , 246–7 , 261 , 268 and n , 271 , 278 , 281 , 439–40 see also Hamersley Range ; Juukan Gorge ; Pilbara iron oxide 44 , 73 , 130n , 216 irons, clothes 251–2 ironstone 177 , 188 , 234 , 238 , 239 , 241 , 244 Irwin, Edward Wood, Lord 141 ISA see International Seabed Authority Jackling, Daniel C. 281 Jadar valley, Serbia 386 jadarite 386 James Cook , RRS 290–91 , 292 , 298 Japan/Japanese 120 , 197 , 213 , 230 , 231 , 234 , 236 , 244 , 313 , 336 , 352 , 381 , 382 , 421 companies 58 , 101 , 266 , 383 , 400 , 401 , 404 , 406 Jefferson County, Texas: oil 312 ‘jelly rolls’ 402 , 408 , 409 , 427 jet 30 , 125 jet engines/jets 92 , 225 , 255 , 311 , 317 , 331 , 434 Jetti (company) 304 , 305 Jevons, William Stanley: ‘Jevons paradox’ 227–8 , 245 Joralemon, Ira 279 JSR (company) 119 Jutland, Battle of (1916) 52 Juukan Gorge, Australia 238–42 Kao, Sir Charles 59 , 60 , 61 Kay, John: flying shuttle 89 kelp 153 , 179 , 180 kerosene 312 , 317 , 329 , 331 , 434 Keynes, John Maynard 5 Khashoggi, Jamal 320 Khewra salt mine, Pakistan 144 see Himalayan salt kidney dialysis 155 Kieserite 178 kilns, rotary 76–7 Kiruna mine, Sweden 247 knee replacements 354 Komatsu (company): trucks 266–7 Korea, South 244 and deep-sea mining 298 electric cars 404 silicon-chip manufacturers 212 Kryptonite 386 Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine: magnetite 247 Kurlansky, Mark 133–4n Kuwait: oil 313 Kuznets, Simon 439 Kyiv, Ukraine: Olympic stadium 210 Laelianus, Emperor 126 Lam Research (company) 119 Laurasia a94 lead 3 , 273 , 340–42 , 418 learning curve, the 427–8 Leblanc, Nicolas 154 , 156 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van 36 Leftwich, Cheshire 147 , 148 lenses 36 , 37 , 46 Leonardo da Vinci 37 helicopter sketches 90 Leopold II, king of the Belgians 413–14 , 416 Le Play, Frédéric 260 lettuces, growing 346 Leuna works, Germany 337 , 338 Lewisian gneiss 43 LG Chem (company) 401 Li Keqiang 229 Li-Cycle (company) 421 ‘Liberty Ships’ 229 Librium 152 light, electricity and 255 , 263 lightbulbs 263 , 264 , 429 lignite 334 limestone 39 , 73 , 76 , 81 , 82 , 84 , 85 , 154 , 219 limonite 234 Linto Crystal (company) 119 Lipetsk, Russia: high-rise blocks 83 Lippe, Germany: silver sands 42 lithium 8 , 17–19 , 22 , 52 , 170 , 188 , 189 , 243 , 244 , 372–3 , 376–7 , 411 , 437 extracting and refining 13 , 15 , 384–96 recycling 419 , 420 , 421 , 424 see also batteries ; Salar de Atacama lithium carbonate 396 , 412 lithium chloride 376 lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) 408 lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP) 408 lithium hydroxide 395 , 412 , 419 , 423 Liverpool 147–8 Lochaline, Scotland: silver sands 41 , 42 , 44–5 , 57–8 , 66 , 95 , 158 Lockheed Martin (company) 298 Lodge, Michael 298 , 302 London Canary Wharf 74 concrete 74 Hammersmith flyover 81 Millwall Iron Works 206 The Shard 210 Louis XIV, of France 139 Louis XVI, of France 154 Louvre Museum: pyramid 42 Lovelace, Ada 90 Lübeck, Germany 132 Lumumba, Patrice 417 Maastricht, Netherlands: silver sands 42 Macfarlane, Alan 37 Macron, Emmanuel 301 , 325 magnesium 53 , 181 , 372 , 375 , 385 , 390 magnesium chloride 178–9 magnetite 234 , 247 magnets 225 , 254 , 257 Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, Russia 207–8 , 212 , 247 Maikop oilfield, Russia 337 Malaysia 51n , 65 , 118 , 231 , 352 , 356 Malé, the Maldives 65 Mallorca: saltmaking 130 , 133 Malthus, Thomas: Essay on the Principle of Population 275–6 Malthusians 276 , 279 manganese 15 , 196 , 411 , 419 adding to steel 225 , 227 , 228 in batteries 408 , 409 sub-sea 293 , 300 Mao Zedong 137 , 205 Marandoo mine, Australia 243 María Elena, Chile 171–2 Mariupol, Ukraine 83 , 209 , 210–11 Azovstal Iron and Steel works 195 , 196 , 199 , 208 , 209–10 , 211 , 212–13 , 222 , 247 Ilych steelworks 196 , 209 marlstone 145 , 146 Mars Bagnold Dunes 30 limonite 234 Martin, Gerry 37 mass-production 224 , 226 , 281 material flow analyses 16 medicines see drugs Mediterranean Sea 130 , 140 , 159 , 178 , 258 , 362 , 376 , 427 Mekong Delta 68–9 , 435 mercury 2 , 3 , 156 , 157 , 421 Merthyr Tydfil, Wales: ironworks 206 Mesabi Range, Minnesota 237 , 281 Metals Company, The 300 meteors 27 , 30 , 31 , 43 , 59 , 178 , 217 methane 315 , 346 Mexico lithium 392 oil 320 , 329 , 330 microscopes 36 , 91 Microsoft (company) 115 Mid-Atlantic Ridge 290–92 , 294–6 , 298 , 302 and the Lost City 292 , 302–3 Middlewich, Cheshire 147 , 148 , 158 Midgley, Thomas 340 , 341 Midway Atoll 299 Mikimoto, Kokichi 313 Milch, Field Marshal Erhard 337–8 Miller, Chris 116 Minerali Industriali (company) 58 mining schools 259 , 437 Ministro Hales copper mine, Chile 272 mirrors 36–7 Mitchell, George P. 321–3 , 324 Moe, Håvard 96 , 97 Mohammed bin Salman, Prince 320 Mol, Belgium: silver sands 42 molybdenum 53 , 113 , 225 , 272 Mongolia: Oyu Tolgoi mine 304 Moore, Gordon 90 , 112 Moore’s law 109 and n , 117 , 274 , 284 , 426 Morocco 68 , 179 Morton (company) 144–5 Morvern peninsula, Scotland 43–4 , 57 motors, electric 256 , 263 , 273 , 287 Mponeng gold mine, South Africa 182 Mull, Isle of 44 Murano glassmakers, Venice 35 , 40 Murton, Bram 292 , 295–6 , 301 Musk, Elon 399 , 400 , see also Tesla Mussolini, Benito 337 Na’aman, the 39 Naidu, Sarojini 142 nanotechnology 88 , 91 , 118 , 228 , 232 , 440 , 443 Nantwich, Cheshire 147 , 148 naphtha 357 Napoleon Bonaparte 139 Napoleonic Wars 35 natron 39 , 56–7 , 153 Nauru 300 Nautilus (company) 299–300 neodymium 21 , 253 Neolithic era 126–7 cheesemaking 128–9 salt making 127 , 128 , 129–31 , 134 , 144 , 155 neon 209 , 212 Netherlands 42 , 65 , 66 , 74 , 119 , 120 , 147 , 347 Neumann’s Flash, Cheshire 157 Newcomen, Thomas 221 Newton, Isaac 37 New York American Museum of Natural History 266 concrete 74 Corning 59 electricity 262 , 264 Gigafactory 399 Hudson Yards, Manhattan 210 New York State 132 , 144 , 148 , 157 , 399 New York Times 325 New Yorker 235 Niagara Falls: hydroelectric dam 263 Nicastro, Nof 347 , 349 Nicholas I, Tsar 148 , 158 , 206 nickel 17 , 53 , 253 , 261 , 273 , 277–8 , 411 , 412 , 419 adding to steel 225 in batteries 408 , 409 sub-sea 293 , 294 , 300 Niemeyer, Oscar 80 Nigeria oil 321 , 331 , 333 , 342 salt 134–5 Nikopol, Ukraine 196 niobium 117 , 225 nitrates 168 , 169 , 170–76 , 275 , 281 , 299 , 334 , 393 , 432 ammonium 241 potassium 164 sodium 168 synthetic 174 , 335 nitric acid 168 nitrogen 166 , 173–4 , 176 , 179 , 181 , 275 , 334 , 348 , 349 , 351 nitroglycerine 168 Nixon, President Richard 321 Nobel, Alfred 168 Nordhaus, William 255 , 263 North Carolina, pre-electric 252 North Field (natural gas) 364–5 Northvolt (company) 401 Northwich, Cheshire 147 , 148 , 154–5 , 426 Anderton Boat Lift 155 Noyce, Robert 89 , 112 NPK fertilisers 179 NSG (company) 58 nuclear contamination 230 nuclear mining 303 nuclear power stations 257 , 376 , 431 , 434 Nudds, Ally 45–6 Nvidia (company) 108 nylon 355 obsidian 30 , 31 Odisha, India: saltworks 140 O’Higgins, Bernardo 393 oil 15 , 16 , 17–19 , 22 , 179 , 198 , 279–80 , 363–8 , 430 barrels 329–30n crude 310 , 311–16 , 317 , 318 , 319 , 320–21 , 323 , 324 , 325–6 , 328 , 329 , 434 and green alternatives 342–3 and horizontal drilling 323 hydrogenation 334–5 , 337 Maya crude 329 Merey crude 329 octane rating 339 oil-powered machinery 202 peak 335 and salt domes 312–13 sweet/sour/light/heavy 329–32 see also Saudi Arabia oil refineries 327–9 , 330–32 , 345 , 360 see also Wesseling Old Marston salt mine, Cheshire 148 optical fibres 60–61 Ørsted, Hans Christian 262 Ostrogoths 133 oxygen converters 223 packaging 345 plastic 346 , 353–4 , 356 Palau 301 palladium 21 Palm Jumeirah, Dubai 74 Panama Canal 281 Panasonic (company) 400 , 401 , 402 , 404 , 405 , 407 , 408 , 409 Pangea 177 , 291 paper manufacture 152 , 153 , 190 Papua New Guinea 299–300 Parma, Italy 132 parrotfish excrement 32 Patton, General George S. 336 pearls 313 Pechmann, Hans von 350 Pedro de Valdivia, Chile 175 pencils 10–11 peppers, growing 346 periscopes 46 , 48 Permian Basin, Texas 324–5 Persian Gulf 313 see also Saudi Arabia Perth , HMAS 231 Peru/Peruvians 165 , 167 , 169 , 170 , 175 , 259 , 260 , 288 , 299 , 316 PET see polyethylene terephthalate petermen 165 petrochemicals 320 , 328 , 331 , 344 , 345 , 358 , 363 , 432 petrol/gasoline 319–20 , 331 , 334 , 336 , 345 lead 340–42 octane rating 339 , 340 Petty, William 276 , 439n pharmaceuticals see drugs Phillips Petroleum 353 Humber Refinery 331–2 , 382 Phoenicians 39 , 56–7 , 58 , 130 , 376 , 427 phosphorus 179 photolithography 111 photosynthesis 166 , 347 , 349 Pico Sacro, Spain 93–4 Pilbara, Australia 233–5 , 237 , 243 , 244 , 245 , 246 see also Juukan Gorge Pilkington (company) 58 Pinochet, Augusto 175 , 391 pipelines 76 , 210 , 225 , 318 , 362 , 364 Planté, Gaston 378 , 379 , 382 plastic bags 354 , 358 , 359–60 plastic bottles 354 , 355 , 360 plastic pipes 354 , 355 plastics 20 , 33 , 152 , 328 , 331 , 344 , 345 , 350–51 , 359–60 , 443 microplastics 359 recycling 360 thermosetting 356 thermoplastics 356 see also polyester ; polyethylene (polythene) ; polymers ; polypropylene ; vinyl platinum 21 Plato 275 Pliny the Elder 38 , 39 , 427 Ploiesti oil fields, Romania 337 ploughs 201–2 , 223 , 441 Poland deep-sea mining 302 , 303 salt mine 144 polyester 356 , 360 polyethylene (polythene) 350–55 , 356 , 358 , 359 , 426 , 435 polyethylene terephthalate (PET) 360 polyhalite 181–7 , 188 , 189 polymers 354–5 , 356 , 360 polymetallic nodules 292–3 , 294 , 295 , 297 , 300 polypropylene 355 polysilicon 97–9 , 100–2 , 104–5 , 120–21 polystyrene 355 polythene see polyethylene polyvinyl chloride (PVC) 152 , 355 Ponce Lerou, Julio 175 , 176 Port Hedland, Australia 244 Port Talbot, Wales: iron and steel industry 214–16 , 217 , 218 , 222 , 225–6 , 228 , 231–2 , 244 , 246 Portland cement 75 , 80 , 83 , 84 , 85 potash 56–7 , 179–80 , 182 , 187 , 376 potassium 179 , 372 , 375 , 376 , 390 potassium chloride 179 potassium nitrate 164 potters 219 power stations 95 , 98 , 198 , 210 , 257 , 262 , 263 , 264 , 288 , 443 see also nuclear power stations Prat, Arturo 170 , 265 preservatives 345 Prince of Wales , HMS 231 prisms, glass 36 , 37 Project SLOOP 303 propane 315 Prudhoe Bay, Alaska 320 Puutu Kunti Kurrama 238 , 239 , 240 , 241 , 242–3 PVC see polyvinyl chloride Pyrex 8 , 59 Qatar 345 , 363–5 Qualcomm (company) 108 , 118 Quantum processors 117 quartz 31 , 40 , 41 , 87 , 94–7 and Czochralski crucibles 105–7 Quartz Corp 106 quartzite 12 , 53 , 95 , 120 quicklime 82 Rackham, Oliver 218n radar systems 352–3 , 358 radionuclides 230 rails, train 198 , 201 , 225 , 234 , 244–5 Rankin, Maurice 187–8 , 189–90 Ras Laffan, Qatar 363–5 Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia 361–3 Ravenscroft, George 35 , 53 , 207 Read, Leonard: ‘I, Pencil’ 10 , 11 recycling 245–6 , 360 , 419–23 , 424 Redcar steelworks 188 Redwood Materials (company) 421 Renaissance, the 36–7 Repulse , HMS 231 resins 345 , 420 , 433 rhodium 21 Rinehart, Gina 236 Río Grande, Chile 388 Rio Tinto (company) 236 , 237 , 238 , 239–43 , 247 , 259 , 386 Roberts, Field Marshal Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl 49 robots 111 , 113 , 226 , 274 , 404 Rockefeller, John D. 335 , 344 , 351 , 358 Rohlfs, Gerhard 28–9 , 30 Romans 38 , 54 , 125 , 126 , 133 , 340 concrete 75 , 85 , 340 copper and tin mining 259 , 284 roads 132 salt/salt making 127 , 132 , 135 , 136 , 146–7 , 155 Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin 336 Ronbay Technology (company) 408 Royal Air Force 338 , 339 , 352–3 Royal Navy copper bottoming ships 259–60 , 261 iron cladding ships 206 wooden ships and masts 218 Royal Society 148 rubber 50–51 Rugby: cement plant 76–7 , 82 Runcorn, Cheshire: salt making 151–2 , 153 Russia/Soviet Union 206 and deep-sea mining 297 , 298 invasion of Ukraine see Ukraine iron and steel industry 206 , 207–8 , 212 oil and gas 319 , 320 , 322 , 324 , 330 potash production 180 railway 208 Siberian gas 364 , 365 SABIC (company) 358 Sabón plant, Spain 95–7 Sahara, Western 68 , 179 Salar de Atacama, Chile 371–2 , 374–5 , 384 , 385 , 389 , 390 , 398 , 423–4 Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia 372 , 384–5 , 410 Salar del Carmen, Chile 393–5 salt/salt making 12 , 15 , 17–19 , 22 , 127–31 , 143–4 , 146 , 168n , 190–91 , 219 , 372 , 374–5 , 395 , 428–9 and chemicals/pharmaceuticals industry 150–51 , 152–3 , 155–6 , 191 in China 135–8 chloralkali process 151–3 , 156 and electrolysis 263n and flashes 157 fleur de sel 130 and n , 376 in France 138–9 for gritting roads 160–61 , 162 Himalayan (Khewra) 130n , 144 in India 139–41 and oil 312–13 routes and trade 131–5 solution mines 144–5 , 147 , 150 , 158–61 table (sodium chloride) 22 , 127 , 130n , 151 , 168 , 176 taxes 138–9 weaponisation of 135 see also saltpetre salt lakes 372 , 384 , 385 Salt Union, Cheshire 149–50 saltpetre 162 , 164–5 , 166 , 175 , 179 Saltpetre War/War of the Pacific (1879–83) 168–70 , 175 , 265 , 267 , 392 Salus 155 Salzach, River 98 Samsung (company) 114 Samurai sword makers 200 sand dunes 28 , 29–30 sands 7–8 , 15 , 16 , 17–19 , 21–2 , 31–3 , 62 , 66 , 70–71 , 198 , 435 building on 63–4 construction 73 , 74 , 85–6 ‘fossil deposits’ 68 and glass 30 , 35 , 38–41 , 42 , 46 , 71 quartz 44 , 57–8 , 87–8 , 120 and regulations 66–7 , 68 , 69 and rivers 68–9 silica/silver 41–2 , 71 , 153 , 219 , 220 ; see also Lochaline Santiago de Compostela, Spain 93 Sanyo (company) 401–2 Sardinia: salt 133 Saudi Arabia oil 309–10 , 313–15 , 316–17 , 318 , 320 , 321 , 324 , 325–6 , 329 see also Ras Tanura Savery, Thomas 221 Schleiden, Matthias Jakob: Das Salz 139 Schott, Otto 48 , 52 , 54 , 93 , 154 , 376–7 , 381 Science (journal) 277 , 280 Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner 328 seas 297 deep-sea mining 292–303 , 420 seaweeds 153 sedatives 152 SEH (US division of Shin-Etsu) 101 Seif dunes 29–30 semiconductors 9 , 89 , 91 , 92 , 100 , 209 ; see silicon chips Sermon on the Mount 63–4 Serrabal quartz mine, Spain 94–5 , 106 Shagang (company) 13 , 207 shale 177 , 233 , 322 , 323 , 330 , 360 Shanghai, China 234 , 399 Shaw, Steve 184–6 Sheffield steel 229 Shell oil refinery, Germany 343 Sherlock, Steve 125–7 , 128–9 , 130 , 131 , 177 Shetland Islands: salting cod 132 Shin-Etsu (company) 101 , 103 , 105 ships/shipbuilding 210 , 290 , 291 coal 220 container 51 , 440 and fuel 317 , 318 , 434 steel 228–9 , 231 VLCCs 361–2 , 440 see also Royal Navy Shockley, William 89 Shoshone people, Western 2 , 3 , 17 , 237 Sibelco (company) 105–6 Siemens process 98 , 100 , 121 , 190 silica (silicon dioxide) 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 38–9 , 95 see also sands , silica silicon 8 , 12 , 31 , 33 , 35 , 40 , 73 , 88–9 , 100 , 113 , 225 , 227 ; and see below silicon carbide 58 silicon chips (semiconductors) 8 , 9 , 11–12 , 17 , 21 , 34 , 88 , 93–7 , 117 , 127 , 190 , 212 , 274 , 425–6 , 442 silicon metal 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 433 silicon tetrachloride 59 Silicon Valley, California 92 silicon wafers 12 , 88 , 89 , 93 , 106 , 101 , 103 , 105–6 , 107 , 110–14 , 116–17 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 188 , 262 siltstone 177 , 233 silver 258 , 416 , 418 , 419 Simmons, Matt: Twilight in the Desert 325–6 Simon, Julian 274 , 275 , 276 , 277 , 278 , 279 , 326 Singapore 66 , 103 Sirius (company) 187 Skinningrove, North Yorkshire 93 , 131 skyscrapers 78 , 79–80 , 225 , 234 , 245 , 256 smartphones 12 , 33 , 34 , 88 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 117 , 244 , 332 , 383–4 batteries 353 , 381n , 383 , 402–3 smelting 97 , 217 , 218 , 219 , 258 , 260 , 261 , 267 , 422 , 433 , 440 , 442 SMIC (company) 114 Smil, Vaclav 98–9 Smith, Adam: The Wealth of Nations 428 soaps 152 , 153 soda ash 153–4 , 155 , 157 , 179 , 190 , 351 , 395 sodium 372 sodium bicarbonate 155 , 351 , 395 sodium chloride 127 , 134 , 150 , 168 and n , 174 , 175 , 178 , 374 , 375 ; see salt sodium hydroxide see caustic soda sodium nitrate 168 solar panels 15 , 104 , 190 , 257 , 288 , 319 , 373 , 399 , 409 , 427 , 436 recycling 420 Solidia (company) 85 Solvay, Ernest 156 Solvay process 154 , 179 Sony (company) 383 , 401 Soviet Union see Russia Space Shuttle 59 Sparks, Nevada 397–9 spectacles 36 spodumene (lithium aluminium silicate) mines 385 , 412 , 421 , 423 Spratly Islands 65 Spruce Pine mines, North Carolina 105–7 SQM (Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile) (company) 175–6 , 375 , 376 , 389 , 390 , 391 , 393–6 Stalin, Joseph 207–8 Standard Oil (company) 335 , 344 , 351 Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) 59 , 60 , 61 Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd 60 steam engines 221 , 256 , 318 steam turbines 257 steel/steelworks 6 , 7 , 9 , 12 , 18 , 20 , 34 , 125 , 156 , 196–8 , 201 , 203–6 , 209 , 214 , 222–4 , 230 , 232 , 244 , 247–8 , 426 , 429 adding alloys 224–6 and car industry 226–8 carbon content 199 ‘direct reduced iron’ 246 green 245 , 246 , 247 , 432 Forth Bridge, Scotland 200 and greenhouse gas emissions 204 low-background 230–31 powdered 229 recycling 245–6 , 419–20 and shipbuilding 228–9 stainless 21 , 225 swords 199–200 tools and machinery 202 vacuum-moulded 229 ‘vanilla’ 224 , 228 see also Mariupol Steineke, Max 310 STL see Standard Telecommunication Laboratories stone(s) 15 , 16 , 19 , 73–4 ; see also gravel Straubel, J.

Team Geek
by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
Published 6 Jul 2012

[21] Of course, when an engineer needs uninterrupted time and can’t afford the costs of context switching, it’s totally acceptable to ignore chat. [22] See the excellent section on comments in The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher (O’Reilly). [23] Find this and several other style guides at http://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/. [24] Roy, Blade Runner, 1982. Chapter 3. Every Boat Needs a Captain Even if you’ve sworn on your mother’s grave that you’ll never become a “manager,” at some point in your career you’re going to accidentally trip and fall into a leadership position. This chapter will help you understand what to do when this happens.

Western USA
by Lonely Planet

La Plaza de Cultura y Artes MUSEUM (www.lapca.org; 501 Main St; adult/child $9/5; noon-7pm Wed-Sun; ) This new museum (opened 2010) chronicles the Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles, in exhibits about city history from the Zoot Suit Riots to the Chicana movement. Calle Principal re-creates Main St in the 1920s. Union Station LANDMARK (800 N Alameda St; ) This majestic 1939 edifice is the last of America’s grand rail stations; its glamorous art-deco interior can be seen in Blade Runner, Bugsy, Rain Man and many other movies. Chinese American Museum MUSEUM ( 213-485-8567; www.camla.org; 425 N Los Angeles St; adult/child $3/2; 10am-3pm Tue-Sun) This small but smart museum is on the site of an early Chinese apothecary and general store, and exhibits probe questions of identity.

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Now encircled by high-rises, there’s public art and summer concerts. Nearby, some turn-of-the-last century architecture remains as it once was. Latino-flavored Broadway has the 1893 Bradbury Building (304 S Broadway; 9am-6pm Mon-Fri, to 5pm Sat & Sun), whose dazzling galleried atrium featured prominently in Blade Runner. In the early 20th century, Broadway was a glamorous shopping and theater strip, where megastars such as Charlie Chaplin leapt from limos to attend premieres at lavish movie palaces. Some – such as the Orpheum Theater (842 Broadway) – have been restored and once again host screenings and parties.

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Silver Fox BAR (www.silverfoxlongbeach.com; 411 Redondo Ave, Long Beach) Despite its name, all ages frequent this mainstay of gay Long Beach, especially on karaoke nights. It is a short drive from shopping on Retro Row. Edison BAR (www.edisondowntown.com; 108 W 2nd St, off Harlem Alley, Downtown; Wed-Sat) Metropolis meets Blade Runner at this industrial-chic basement boîte, where you’ll be sipping mojitos surrounded by turbines and other machinery back from its days as a boiler room. Don’t worry: it’s all tarted up nicely with cocoa leather couches, three cavernous bars and a dress code. Seven Grand BAR ( 213-614-0737; 515 W 7th St, Downtown) It’s as if hipsters invaded Mummy and Daddy’s hunt club, amid the tartan-patterned carpeting and deer heads on the walls.

Eyewitness Top 10 Los Angeles
by Catherine Gerber
Published 29 Mar 2010

You don’t have to be a Roman Catholic to appreciate the lovely tapestries of the nave, depicting dozens of saints (see p72). Los Angeles Top 10 of this 1893 office building, with its open-cage elevators, frilly iron work, and marble floors, is one of LA’s supreme architectural landmarks. Architect George Wyman allegedly accepted the job only after consulting a Ouija board. Movie buffs might recognize it from Blade Runner and Chinatown. * Chemosphere John Lautner’s bold, often  + experimental architectural style is perfectly exemplified in this unique private home in the Hollywood Hills. Resembling a Bradbury Building flying saucer on a single concrete column, it was built in 1960, the same year  : 3DVDGHQD  2 ' (SJGmUI *OHQGDOH President John F. : <  1BSL $ ) 1 ( Kennedy launched $' %HYHUO\ :HVW $OKDPEUD +LOOV '  +ROO\ZRRG  the challenge to put a 9 :HVWZRRG %/   $    &  , man on the moon.

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How
by Daniel Coyle
Published 27 Apr 2009

These two insights—skills as brain circuits and automaticity—create a paradoxical combination: we're forever building vast, intricate circuits, and we're simultaneously forgetting that we built them. Which is where myelin comes in. To say that myelin looks boring is to flatter it. Myelin does not look merely boring. It looks fantastically, unrelentingly, stupendously dull. If the brain is a Blade Runner cityscape of dazzling neuronal structures, flashing lights, and whizzing impulses, then myelin plays the humble role of the asphalt. It's the uniform, seemingly inert infrastructure. It's composed of a mundanity known as phospholipid membrane, a dense fat that wraps like electrical tape around a nerve fiber, preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Published 15 Mar 2021

The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds—these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances. As one replicant in Blade Runner says to Harrison Ford, who may or may not be playing a replicant: “You think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?” It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed.

The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilisation
by Nicholas P. Money
Published 22 Feb 2018

This form of accelerated evolution will also advance the goal of creating a yeast strain with a minimal genome, a servile Überpilz or superfungus. Sc2.0 will be a semi-artificial 100 fr a nk e n y e ast: ce l l s form of life that will operate according to the desires of its ­engineers. Sc2.0 will be a bioengineered cell, a mixture of nature and artifice, a “replicant” for those familiar with the 1982 movie Blade Runner and other science fictions. If the genome of Sc2.0 is capable of operating on its own, without any interference from the genome of Sc1.0, the fungus will make its own machinery for protein synthesis, replicate and repair its DNA, formulate a system of internal membranes, make buds, and even reproduce if we engineer Sc2.0a and Sc2.0α strains.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

Not only will each individual capability (e.g., writing, voice, face, conversation) improve greatly in the coming years, but their convergence will create simulations that are more realistic than the sum of their parts. One type of AI avatar that we can create, called a “replicant” (to borrow a term from Blade Runner), will have the appearance, behavior, memories, and skills of a person who has passed away, living on in a phenomenon I call After Life. After Life technology will go through multiple phases. The most primitive such simulations have already existed for about seven years as I write this. In 2016, The Verge published a remarkable article about a young woman named Eugenia Kuyda who used AI and saved text messages to “resurrect” her dead best friend, Roman Mazurenko.[82] As the amount of data each of us generates grows, ever more faithful re-creations of specific humans will become possible.

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See cryptocurrencies BiTEs (Bispecific T cell engagers), 239 black box problem, 18 Blackburn, Simon, 82 Black Death. See bubonic plague black holes, 1–2, 98 black silicon, 172–73 Blade Runner (movie), 100 Bletchley Declaration, 283 bloodstream, nanobots in. See nanobots blue goo, 277. See also nanobots Bode, Stella de, 88–89 BoJack Horseman (TV show), 221 book publishing, 53, 159–60, 212, 253 Boston Dynamics, 101 Bostrom, Nick, 41, 62, 104, 268–69, 295n bottlenecks, 60, 61 bottom-up approach to nanotech, 249–50 brain, human cerebellum of.

The Internet Is a Playground
by David Thorne
Published 24 Mar 2010

I read somewhere that if there is no water available, you can drink your own urine, so I always take a two-liter bottle of it wherever I go just in case. Survival Tip #2 Do not eat the bright purple mushrooms. Once while lost, I found and ate some bright purple mushrooms, figuring such a friendly color could not possibly be dangerous. A short time later, a beetle and I discussed the differences between the director’s cut of Blade Runner and the cinematic release. Always remember that bark is an excellent source of nutrition and can be prepared simply by marinating overnight and cooking for twenty minutes in a preheated oven at 240 degrees Celsius. Things that should not be eaten: Bright purple mushrooms Rocks Cha-Chi’s Mexican Restaurant food Wasps Survival Tip #3 Building yourself a shelter is an integral part of survival.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first-order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher’s favorite song is not in the same league. I don’t claim I can build a meter to detect precisely where the boundary between first-and second-order expression lies.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

But that is not to say that we shouldn’t think about Keynes’s and Andreessen’s vision of a world in which most of us have a lot of leisure time. If Frey and Osborne are right, and 47 percent of jobs may be automated in the next two decades, then we face one of two possible futures. The dystopian future of mass unemployment and psychological alienation leading to deep social unrest is one we have already seen in Blade Runner. The only present remedy is to create millions of low-wage “bullshit jobs”—the writer David Graeber’s term. Graeber notes, “Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell
Published 13 Apr 2020

The days of this world are numbered. For those who are willing to escape it, a new life awaits. The frontier rhetoric around Mars colonization—the invocation of pioneers, pilgrims, Manifest Destiny—brings to mind for me the advertising blimp that hovers over the filthy neon hellscape of downtown Los Angeles in one of Blade Runner’s early scenes. A gigantic screen displays the messages “Best Future” and “Breathe Easy,” while a voice blares from its speakers, addressing the acid rain–sodden subjects below: “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

And on the screen-not the screen just destroyed, but the television screens of 43 million people watching the Super Bowl-appeared the followingwords: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984." This was the notorious "1984" spot. Directed by Ridley Scott, it had all the cyberpunk film noir of his recent cult hit Blade Runner, and a more coherent plot-IBM takes a fall. It cost a half million dollars to film. Scott recruited an Olympic athlete to hurl the hammer and London skinheads as audience extras. Apple Computer bought air time for it only twice: once late in December, in an obscure television market some- where on the Great Plains, so that it would be eligible for the inevitable awards in the new year; and the other during the Super Bowl.

Humankind: Solidarity With Non-Human People
by Timothy Morton
Published 14 Oct 2017

In his egotism he sought an explanation of himself in the infinite, and out of his efforts there arose the dreary doctrine that he was not related to the Earth, that she was but a temporary resting place for his scornful feet and that she held nothing for him but temptation to degrade himself. —Emma Goldman and Max Baginski, “Mother Earth” Gosh, you’ve really got some nice toys here. —Replicant Roy, Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, dir.) Things in Common: An Introduction Whoever severs himself from Mother Earth and her flowing sources of life goes into exile. —Emma Goldman A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman. Humankind will argue that the human species is a viable and vital category for thinking communist politics, a politics that this book takes not simply to be international in scope, but planetary.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

Zuora works with all sorts of SVOD services, from major cable networks to regional providers, and we’re also lucky to work with the first dedicated online video subscription service ever. What’s its name? Crunchyroll. More than a million subscribers pay Crunchyroll to watch hit anime shows like Cowboy Bebop and Dragon Ball Z (for my fellow uncool people, anime refers to Japanese animated TV shows), as well as exclusives like the anime prequel to Blade Runner 2049. Crunchyroll is actually big everywhere except Japan—they specialize in overseas rights and have viewers in more than 180 countries, from Brazil to Botswana. Crunchyroll started off in 2006 as a piracy site. Not to condone piracy, but by the time they relaunched as an official subscription service in 2009, Crunchyroll benefited from two things: early brand recognition and a keen sense of what their fans liked and didn’t like.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

As the machine finished filling my cup, its spray terminating in a colorful little stalactite, I just caught my reflection in the station’s window. The attendant across the floor said something my way: “Yo, are you talking to yourself ?” I stopped for a moment. “I guess it’s just that kind of day,” I offered. In the parking lot I turned up my stereo to play “Blade Runner Blues.” Haroon called about setting up our new gun file sharing website. I stood under the blue-green fluorescent lights outside my car, trying to catch any glimpse of the Austin State Hospital through the trees. “Why don’t we do a sign-up process?” I said out the side of my mouth. “Work their desire like they work ours.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

He just said, “Go make it great.” Mike Murray: And they hired Ridley Scott. Ridley Scott: When I first saw the boards, I thought, My God, they are mad! It was such a dramatic idea that it would either be totally successful or we’d all get put in the state pen. Lee Clow: Ridley Scott had just finished doing Blade Runner, and so we were using a famous director and we were going to do something really special. Ridley Scott: From a filmic point of view it was terrific, and I knew exactly how to do a kind of pastiche on what 1984 maybe was like in dramatic terms rather than factual terms. Mike Murray: It was the first time that a filmmaker—a moviemaker—had been hired to make a commercial, because in those days that was considered dipping way down and becoming very commercially crass.

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Eric Schmidt was Google’s so-called adult supervision: a seasoned CEO, installed at the insistence of investors who believed that the company could not survive with its young cofounder, Larry Page, at the helm. Schmidt served for ten years, from 2001 to 2011, whereupon a presumably grown-up Page retook control. Ridley Scott directed Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, The Martian, and “1984”—the commercial that launched the Macintosh computer. John Sculley was the Pepsi executive whom Jobs famously recruited to be the CEO of Apple in 1983 by asking him, “Do you really want to sell sugar water, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

The best way to avoid overfitting, as Popper suggests, is to try to prove the model wrong and to build algorithms that give the benefit of the doubt. If Netflix shows me a romantic comedy and I like it, it’ll show me another one and begin to think of me as a romantic-comedy lover. But if it wants to get a good picture of who I really am, it should be constantly testing the hypothesis by showing me Blade Runner in an attempt to prove it wrong. Otherwise, I end up caught in a local maximum populated by Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. The statistical models that make up the filter bubble write off the outliers. But in human life it’s the outliers who make things interesting and give us inspiration. And it’s the outliers who are the first signs of change.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

On the upside, those who resist the mark and maintain their faith in the Lord will receive the ultimate hardship pay: eternal bliss. Guest told me about a Spanish resort where patrons can have a microchip implanted under the skin to make transactions simpler and, presumably, to coax them into spending more at the bar. (It’s not easy to carry a wallet in a thong bikini.) It sounds like something right out of Blade Runner. Yet evidence supporting Guest’s fear about controlled commerce isn’t confined to such oddities. In the winter of 2010 the New York Times echoed this prophecy in an editorial about the decision by MasterCard, VISA, PayPal, and others to stop processing payments for Wikileaks: “A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.”

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

They spent half of a day there and only saw a small part of the huge network of buildings, stalls, and marketplaces. The market was several large city blocks of multiple-story buildings with stalls packed into each floor. Each building had a theme, ranging from LEDs to cell phone hacking and repair. The entire place had a Blade Runner feel. The tour started in the section of the market where people take broken or trashed cell phones and strip them down for parts. Any phone part that has conceivably retained functionality is stripped off and packaged for sale in big plastic bags. Another source of components is rejected parts from the factory lines that are then repaired, or sheets of PCBs in which only one of the components has failed a test. iPhone home buttons, Wi-Fi chipsets, Samsung screens, Nokia motherboards, everything.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

He embodied the ‘fusion of flower power and processor power’. Even as Apple grew into a multi-billion dollar corporation, Jobs continued to identify with computing’s early subversives and long-haired pioneers – the hackers, pirates, geeks and freaks that made the future possible. Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame directed the commercial. It shows Big Brother projected on a screen, addressing lines of workers. These skinhead drones wear identical uniforms. Into the grey nightmare bursts an attractive young woman. She wears orange shorts and a white tank top. She is carrying a hammer! Police in riot gear run after her.

Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--And How It All Came Crashing Down . . .
by Ben Mezrich
Published 27 May 2013

A kid who’d grown up in a trailer at the mercy of a mentally disturbed, majorly addicted single mother, literally dodging frying pans, irons, razor blades, and the odd shotgun blast—and here he was, speeding through the streets of Seoul, in the back of a Mercedes sedan, on his way to a business meeting. All those hours spent jammed in that basement downing Red Bull and crunching numbers were suddenly worth it; this was really happening. He looked at Garin, whose face was striped with reflected neon. “This is Blade Runner shit,” he murmured, and then he pressed his face against the side window, letting the rumble of the Mercedes’s engine play deep into his bones. Floor-to-ceiling windows; high-tech, chrome-and-leather ergonomic office chairs; thick, blindingly white wall-to-wall carpeting; giant glowing TV screens hanging from the ceiling; and a burnished redwood boardroom table running the entire length of the room, supporting a half dozen state-of-the-art computer monitors and keyboards.

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Published 1 Mar 2006

Certainly the old gold coasts remain — like Zamalek in Cairo, Riviera in Abidjan, Victoria Island in Lagos, and so on — but the novel global trend since the early 1990s has been the explosive growth of exclusive, closed suburbs on the peripheries of Third World cities. Even (or especially) in China, the gated community has been called the "most significant development in recent urban planning and design.'"58 These "off worlds" — to use the terminology of Blade Runner — are often imagineered as replica Southern Californias. Thus, "Beverly Hills" does not exist only in the 90210 zip code; it is also, with Utopia and Dreamland, a suburb of Cairo, an affluent private city "whose inhabitants can keep their distance from the sight and severity of poverty and the violence and political Islam which is seemingly permeating the localities.'"59 Likewise, "Orange County" is a gated estate of sprawling million-dollar California-style homes, designed by a Newport Beach architect and with Martha Stewart decor, on the northern outskirts of Beijing.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

(At its best, science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress.) But intentionally or otherwise, science fiction does a very important job for all of us when we think about the future: it provides us with metaphors and scenarios. Many of the most popular science fiction stories present dystopian scenarios: think Terminator, Blade Runner, 1984, Brave New World, and so on. But there are also positive scenarios, and one of the most popular ones is Star Trek. Set in the 24th century, Star Trek presents a world of immense possibility, of interstellar travel, adventure, and split infinitives. And a world without money or poverty.

Explore Everything
by Bradley Garrett
Published 7 Oct 2013

We then cut our teeth on Mark Lane, an abandoned London Underground station on the District Line between Monument and Tower Hill we accessed by squeezing through a small window under a restaurant. Inside, we found the station covered in withering posters from another time, and we hid behind walls as trains passed through, surging beams of light that lit up the soot-covered tunnels like something out of Blade Runner, an amalgamation of forgotten urban archaeology and mechanised transport technology. That was the first disused London Underground station that Team B had done, despite the fact that Bacchus and others on Team A had already explored a number of areas in the network and had generally been doing abandoned rapid transport stations (ARTS) in other parts of the world for some time.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal , Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Published 16 Apr 2018

Early on, famed venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson quipped: “Just about any product that you experience in the next five years that seems like magic will almost certainly be built by these algorithms.”3 Jurvetson’s characterization of AI as “magical” resonated with the popular narrative of AI in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and more recently Her, Transcendence, and Ex Machina. We understand and sympathize with Jurvetson’s characterization of AI applications as magical. As economists, our job is to take seemingly magical ideas and make them simple, clear, and practical. Cutting through the Hype Economists view the world differently than most people.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

The title stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” and marked the first ever usage of a term—derived from the Czech word “robota,” meaning “forced labor”—which would quickly become a convergence point in the intersecting mythologies of science fiction and capitalism. Visually, Čapek’s robots have less in common with later canonical representations of gleaming metallic humanoids—the more or less direct lineage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to George Lucas’s Star Wars to James Cameron’s Terminator—than with Blade Runner’s uncannily convincing replicants. They look more or less indistinguishable, that is, from humans; they are creatures not of circuitry and metal, but of flesh, or a fleshlike substance—produced in a series of “mixing vats,” one for each organ and body part, from a mysterious compound referred to as “batter.”

How to Predict the Unpredictable
by William Poundstone

Whenever you’re not sure which of several options is right for you, take that as a cue to think seriously about picking the smallest or cheapest one. The most ambitious goal of Big Data may be differential pricing. This means tailoring prices to the individual, based on predictions of how much that consumer is willing to pay. It sounds unfair and un-American and Blade Runner–ish. Well, that ship has sailed. We’ve long had differential pricing in certain markets. Holiday-makers who plan ahead get lower airfares than businesspeople who can’t. Coupons, rebates, and loyalty cards are other examples. The shoppers who bother with them save pennies over those who can’t be bothered.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
by Simon Sinek
Published 29 Oct 2009

By their third year in business they were a $100 million company, and they attained billion-dollar status within only six years. Already a household name, in 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh with their famed “1984” commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. Directed by Ridley Scott, famed director of cult classics like Blade Runner, the commercial also changed the course of the advertising industry. The first “Super Bowl commercial,” it ushered in the annual tradition of big-budget, cinematic Super Bowl advertising. With the Macintosh, Apple once again changed the tradition of how things were done. They challenged the standard of Microsoft’s DOS, the standard operating system used by most personal computers at the time.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

And with total indifference, they continue to emit another, imperceptible type of pollution: fluorinated gas. Digital’s hazardous haze Spring 2019. The view from the seventeenth floor of a hotel in Datong, a city with a population of 3.4 million, 300 kilometres west of Beijing, could be a scene straight from the film Blade Runner: high-rise buildings, like modern-day haunted castles, reach up into an ominous sky. For three days, this megacity will remain trapped in a fog where night and day become indistinguishable. The number-one enemy of conurbations in China is carbon dioxide, and when the wind sweeps the smoke from coal-fired plants into the city centres, you’re better off staying at home.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Since then, prosthetics have come a long way, not merely replacing partial bodily functionality lost because of injury or disease, but actually improving the capabilities of well-functioning biological equivalents. These advances were highlighted in the case of the gold-medal-winning South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the double below-the-knee amputee, who was persistently targeted by other athletes who complained his “blade runner” artificial limbs gave him an unfair advantage. Today, technology is artificially augmenting not only our limbs and senses but our minds as well. Over 90 percent of smart-phone owners report keeping their mobile phones within three feet of them, all hours of the day, a number that will surely increase in the future.

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The potential for criminal abuse of self-driving vehicles has not escaped some in law enforcement, and the FBI issued an internal report citing fears about their forthcoming use as lethal weapons. Officials predicted that robotic conveyances could be used as VBIEDs preprogrammed to autonomously drive across town to detonate at their intended targets. Those fears we’ve always had about killer robots, depicted in films such as Westworld, Blade Runner, RoboCop, The Terminator, and I, Robot, may unfortunately be at the early stages of already materializing. Attack of the Drones Drones are scary. You can’t reason with a drone. MATT GROENING When Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, announced in late 2013 that the world’s “everything store” would soon be using octocopter drones to deliver packages to its customers, the world sat up and noticed.

The Global Minotaur
by Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason
Published 4 Jul 2015

In fact, it deepens the recession. The ghost in the machine Judging by our popular culture, we seem obsessed with the fear of losing out to our creations. From the ‘Sweet Porridge’ story of the Brothers Grimm to Goethe’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, from the Jewish ‘Golem’ tales and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to films like Blade Runner and the Terminator series, the evidence is huge that we fear our own artefacts. However, one tale stands out for its capacity to illustrate the greatest paradox of our postmodern condition: The Matrix, a 1999 film by Larry and Andy Wachowski. In The Matrix, our artefacts’ rebellion is not just a simple case of ‘creator-cide’.

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars
by Nicky Jenner
Published 5 Apr 2017

Bradbury liked the idea of Mars as a mirror of Earth rather than ‘a seer’s crystal in which to read a miraculous future’, imagining explorers finding a ‘somewhat shopworn image of themselves’ on the Red Planet. As with the aforementioned John Carter disaster, The War of the Worlds and Aelita, some of these stories ended up being adapted for the big screen. It’s worth mentioning Philip K. Dick here; Dick’s fiction has inspired and produced an impressive number of hit films, including Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. Dick was unsatisfied with our world, and so tried to critique it and build a better one in his fiction. Total Recall was based on Dick’s 1966 short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, in which an ordinary man from a technologically advanced Earth wants to visit Mars, but can’t afford it.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Nor were there any UberCHOPPERs available at the airport to twirl me on a three-thousand-dollar helicopter ride to downtown Rochester. That was fortunate, really, because Rochester’s downtown—a landscape of boarded-up stores and homeless people wheeling their earthly possessions in rusty shopping carts along empty streets—resembled a picture from the dystopian future. From Blade Runner, perhaps, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie about a twenty-first-century world in which human beings and robots have become indistinguishable. Or from Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction novel, the subversive classic about an electronically networked world that not only popularized the word cyberspace but also may have foreseen Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web five years later.1 “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” Gibson—known on Twitter, perhaps not uncoincidentally, as @GreatDismal—began Neuromancer.

The Startup Wife
by Tahmima Anam
Published 2 Jun 2021

My brain-sneakers and I sprinted through courses and seminars and got me summa-cum-lauded. I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder. In the meantime, I made a friend—a girl called Lynn—and I had a handful of casual hookups and lost my virginity in my dorm room while Constance, my roommate, was at a double feature of Blade Runner and The Big Sleep. Lynn was an actress who was cast as the only woman in the drama department’s all-male production of Macbeth. We bonded over our late blooming. Lynn had spent the summer before college at fat camp and emerged nymphlike just weeks before orientation, but the high school scars were still raw, and over kale chips, which she dehydrated in a toaster oven that she kept illegally in her dorm room, we put Band-Aids over all the slights, sneers, and total invisibleness we had managed to escape.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle
by Dinny McMahon
Published 13 Mar 2018

Yet China has a surprisingly robust track record of building them and then filling them, assuming you’re not in a hurry. Shanghai was one of the first cities to build a new district, turning a stretch of paddy fields across the river to the east into a central business district with a skyline so dense and futuristic that it’s been likened to the city portrayed in Blade Runner. But Pudong—literally “East Riverside”—got off to a shaky start. Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader, visited in 1991 to give the project his blessing and declared that Pudong’s future would lie with financial services at a time when China’s financial sector was still finding its feet after decades of Maoism.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Raising your eyebrows a lot? If the robot recruiter deems you worthy of actual human attention, you will be passed on to the next round of interviews. Fail to impress the software, and you’ll receive a nice thank-you note. This sounds like science fiction, even perhaps like the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, the one used to identify replicants by asking them questions. But this stuff is happening today. A Utah tech company called HireVue provides this service to more than a hundred companies, including Unilever and Hilton Worldwide. Companies like the AI system because it lets them look at far more job candidates—ten times as many as they might see using the old-fashioned in-person approach, HireVue claims.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It.
by James Silver
Published 15 Nov 2018

Practical measures like offering more flexibility and more agile working practices will help encourage a more diverse workforce, and see more women in particular drawn to work in startups, she says. ‘But more than that, we need to be crafting and telling different stories about our industry. The future, the digital economy, will largely depend on the stories we tell ourselves right now. ‘If we want to shape a future that is more diverse, that doesn’t just have Blade Runner-style male heroes, then we need to start telling stories that include different types of heroes, and that’s absolutely fundamental to seeing a meaningful shift. Today’s stereotypes are holding us back from making progress - too often, our expectations and aspirations are set by the advertising we watch, and by the media we consume, and until we change those stories it’s going to be very hard to change perceptions about women in tech/business/ leadership positions.’

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More
by Jason Cochran
Published 5 Feb 2007

. £ If you’re a young person looking for a hostel where you can party all night, there’s no bigger playground than the Generator (Compton Place, off 37 Tavistock Place, WC1; % 020/7388-7666; www.generatorhostels.com; london@generator hostels.com; MC, V; Tube: Russell Square or Euston), discovered down a cobbled lane opposite Kenton Street. By day, the mega-hostel appears like some kind of tanker ship stranded in the mews, and by night, when the socializing is in full swing, it’s like the monkey house at the zoo. The Art Deco building was a police station in its younger years, but a makeover of sheet metal gave it a Blade Runner mood that’s at distinct odds with the Roman proclivities of the clientele. You’ll meet lots of young backpackers—with more than 800 beds, there’s plenty of opportunity to make a new friend or twelve. Guests get access to a microwave and a toaster, but not a full kitchen, so you will have to eat out.

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They optimistically planned for lively crowds by adding Europe’s largest arts and conference center, too, with a concert hall, two theaters, three cinemas, and two galleries. You can’t always find something going on in all of its venues, and even when things are rocking full-tilt, the bunkered Barbican still feels so windswept it makes Blade Runner look like Candy Land, but what does play here is rarely dull. It hosted the first English-language run of the musical Les Misérables in 1985, and today is the home of the celebrated theater company Cheek By Jowl (www.cheekbyjowl.com), which often re-envisions classic texts to critical praise. It’s nearly impossible to classify the Barbican’s fare, since it receives a wide range of the world’s great orchestras, singers, and composers, plus a handful of banner festivals each year, particularly in the realm of contemporary music and experimental theater.

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
by Andy Hertzfeld
Published 19 Nov 2011

Sculley was a bit apprehensive (after all, the commercial hardly mentioned the Macintosh), but he gave his OK for an unprecedented production budget of over $750,000 to make the one-minute commercial. Chiat-Day hired Ridley Scott, the best science fiction–oriented director they could find, whose previous movie, Blade Runner, possessed the visionary dystopian feel for which they were striving. Ridley was based in London, so they decided to shoot it there, at Shepperton Studios. Several Apple and Chiat-Day executives, as well as Mike Murray and Steve Jobs, traveled to London for the week of filming. Ridley’s team had assembled a cast of almost 200 by the time the Apple folks arrived.

Underground, Overground
by Andrew Martin
Published 13 Nov 2012

In 1916 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed to passenger trains, so those from the south terminated at Holborn Viaduct, and those from the north could only go as far as Moorgate. In 1971 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed entirely. In 1988 it was re-opened for the purpose of running trains from Bedford to Brighton. In 1990 City Thameslink station was opened, a sprawling underground complex taking the place of Holborn Viaduct and Ludgate Hill stations. ‘It’s very Blade Runner,’ a PR for the station told me shortly after the opening. She also said that Thameslink trains were deliberately garish, so as to lure drivers stuck on the M1, which runs alongside the line around Radlett. But I don’t think the overcrowded Thameslink service could handle any more passengers today.

vN: The First Machine Dynasty (The Machine Dynasty Book 1)
by Madeline Ashby
Published 28 Jul 2012

Praise for vN "vN is a strikingly fresh work of mind-expanding science fiction." – iO9 "Ashby's debut is a fantastic adventure story that carries a sly philosophical payload about power and privilege, gender and race. It is often profound, and it is never boring." – Cory Doctorow "Picks up where Blade Runner left off and maps territories Ridley Scott barely even glimpsed. vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all off with the Three Laws." – Peter Watts "Will AIs be objects, or people? Caught between the category of human and everything else, we can't think about the very real entities that inhabit – and will inhabit – the excluded middle.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

Their souls were not crushed by this work, because they were made without souls or feelings or passions of any kind. Eventually the humans stop doing any work and the robots do everything until they finally decide to take over and kill all the humans. In most of their modern incarnations, robots serve either as the helpers of humans or their comic foils. From the replicants of Blade Runner to everyone’s favorite protocol droid, C-3PO, robots are obviously still a mainstay of fiction, filling any number of roles. You might remember that the Jetsons had Rosie the Robot, a mechanical maid. One interesting thing to note is that that show was made in 1962 and set in 2062, meaning we are now closer to the time of its setting than the time of its creation.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

Instead, Russian authorities rely on more sophisticated, but also more brutal methods – intimidation, public discrediting, surveillance, and symbolic arrests – while also meddling in organized crime and employing patriotic hackers to muddy attribution. Unfortunately these tactics have proven attractive to a growing number of autocratic regimes looking to control information and digital activism. Russia, the model for the rest of the world? Maybe, if what we have in mind for the future of cyberspace is a Blade Runner dystopia. Kaspersky raised another ominous possibility, telling Sky News at the London conference: “We are close, very close, to cyber terrorism. Perhaps already the criminals have sold their skills to the terrorists, and then … oh, God.” Cyber terrorism. The phrase points to a sense of heightened anxiety that has pervaded talk of cyber security since 9/11 : the view that those hideous events represented a failure (at least in part) of Internet surveillance; that had control been tightened over digital communications the perpetrators might have been identified before they were able to execute their plan.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order
by Bruno Macaes
Published 25 Jan 2018

It is interesting to note how that way of looking at the world – where the whole world is made to fit the categories of European historical development – has now been turned on its head. No longer the land of eternal stagnation, Asia now seems to have a special claim on the future. If one city seems to have fulfilled the aesthetics of Blade Runner, simultaneously dark and gleaming, that city is surely Beijing. This is still a distortion in how the West looks at China, but one with the opposite sign. The struggle to be entirely modern may now be an anxiety affecting Europe more than anywhere else. In the process, Europeans project upon Asian societies the task of living, not in the past, but in the world of science fiction, where nothing is very real for very long.

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism
by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Published 28 Mar 2018

As Canadian author Chris Turner, whose book The Geography of Hope is a must-read, responded on Twitter when I criticized the idea: “You say that as if Foster and the starchitect league have ever attempted to understand how streets work in general.” Indeed. We’ll get into that later. Foster grew up in Manchester, back in an age when that city had around 30 percent modal share for bicycles. Instead of realizing that modern urban planning is seeking to return our cities to their pre-car state, he insists on dishing up city-killing Blade Runner fantasies. You would hope that Foster would harken back to his roots and embrace the kind of city he grew up in. His bizarre idea has spawned a flurry of others. A floating cycle track on the Thames. Bikeways in disused subway tunnels. All ideas that fail to address the basics of a bicycle-friendly city and that continue to cement the car-centric status quo that has failed our cities—and us—so miserably.

Laziness Does Not Exist
by Devon Price
Published 5 Jan 2021

Conversely, characters who face limitations and personal challenges such as physical disabilities or mental illness are almost always portrayed as villains or comical side characters deserving of pity but not respect.32 John Wick has become an iconic action film character because he defeats throngs of enemies almost entirely on his own, and he’s never able to settle into the retirement he keeps promising himself. Many stories about assassins, spies, and supersoldiers follow a similar trajectory, portraying the lives of steely, serious men who just can’t seem to give up their jobs, no matter how horrific they are and how much they brutalize them. From Blade Runner to The Usual Suspects to Inception, some of America’s most classic and iconic action films feature characters who, like Wick, keep putting off retirement for the sake of pursuing one last job.33 That last job never actually ends up being the last one, of course. There’s always a sequel, featuring new opportunities with even higher stakes.

Stealth
by Peter Westwick
Published 22 Nov 2019

The turmoil reached even the suburban sanctuary of Disneyland, where in summer 1970 a group of three hundred antiwar protesters overran security and raised a Viet Cong flag on Tom Sawyer’s Island.29 Far from the utopian visions of just a few years earlier, Los Angeles was becoming synonymous with dystopia, soon represented in movies such as Blade Runner and The Terminator. A 1972 book entitled California: The Vanishing Dream identified a “crisis” in the Golden State.30 In 1977 Time magazine, retreating from its previous sunny outlook, asked in a headline, “Whatever happened to California?” The article answered, “Everyone agrees that the California of the ’60s, a mystical land of abundance and affluence, vanished some time in the ’70s. … California has clearly lost the magic it once had.”31 _______ California had only misplaced the magic, not lost it altogether.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

As schema questions make clear, errors are less excusable when they are simple sentences, with no inherent difficulty for humans. The point is that accuracy is itself contextual, and on tests that expose the absence of any understanding, getting six out of ten answers correct (as with state-of-the-art systems) isn’t progress at all. It’s evidence of disguised idiocy. Like the mythical androids in the sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, a test looking for mind (or real emotion) will eventually unmask machines as programmed impostors. Only, the Winograd schemas are short and quite simple. All it takes is one question, requiring some basic knowledge of what’s being said. Levesque’s “pronoun disambiguation problem” is a vastly simplified step in a very large minefield that automated systems will have to navigate to have a prayer of managing ordinary conversations.

The Rough Guide to Seoul
by Rough Guides
Published 26 Sep 2018

While almost entirely devoid of traditional tourist sights, this is an absorbing place to walk around; these streets – especially to the northeast of the station – are hugely popular with young Koreans, and crammed full of cafés and cheap restaurants. Recent years have seen the local city district adding huge LED displays, full-building octaves of neon and all sorts of other technological gizmos to the roadsides, which, in addition to the massed ranks of high-rises, bring something of a Blade Runner feel to the area. While sights are rather thin on the ground here, it’s an important cultural hub, being home to the superb Seoul Arts Centre and the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. Samsung D’light 삼성 딜라이트 • 11 Seochodae-ro 74-gil • Mon–Sat 10am–7pm • Free • Gangnam subway (line 2) On the lower levels of Samsung Electronics’ towering Gangnam headquarters, Samsung D’light is the company’s sharply designed and highly appealing showroom where you can get a sneak preview of the gadgets that will be racing around the world in the near future.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

The means of mass destruction, from A-bombs to germ warfare, are “democratizing” – spreading so rapidly among nations, groups, and individuals – that we had better see a rapid expansion in sanity and wisdom, or else we’re all doomed. Indeed, strong evidence indicates that the overall education and sagacity of Western civilization and its constituent citizenry has never been higher, and may continue to improve rapidly in the coming century. One thing is certain: we will not see a future that resembles Blade Runner (Scott 1982), or any other cyberpunk dystopia. Such worlds, where massive technology is unmatched by improved accountability, will not be able to sustain themselves. The options before us appear to be limited: 1. Achieve some form of “singularity” – or at least a phase shift, to a higher and more knowledgeable society (one that may have problems of its own that we can’t imagine.) 2.

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Wayt (1995) “Lost Science in the Third World.” Scientific American (August). Good, Irving J. (1965) “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.” Advances in Computers, vol 6. New York: Academic press, pp. 31–88. Kelly, Kevin (1995) “Singular Visionary.” Wired 1.03 (July). Scott, Ridley, dir. (1982) Blade Runner. Tipler, Frank (1994) The Physics of Immortality. New York: Doubleday. Vinge, Vernor (1992) A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor Books. Vinge, Vernor (1993) “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.” NASA VISION-21 Symposium. Originally published in Extropy Online (2000).

Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
Published 2 Jan 2003

MAKING MAYHEM Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she's had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solarishere, using the expressway as found Future City. Now it's been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. Dusk comes early, under here, and she spies signs of homeless encampment, plastic-wrapped blankets tucked back into an uncharacteristically littered scrim of struggling municipal shrubs. Vehicles blast past, overhead, a constant drumming of displaced air, particulates sifting invisibly.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

There also seems to be a gap between what we think might happen to the world around us and what we think might happen to ourselves personally. This helps to explain the appeal, in the midst of our personal optimism, of the dark view of the future in our entertainment culture. For a society that constantly promotes optimism, we are surprisingly addicted to depictions of dystopian futures. Movies like Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Children of War, and books like 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaid’s Tale speak to our fears of where society is headed and provide the details that are so hard for us to imagine. Because these projections of our fears are fictitious, we can seal ourselves off from the truly frightening implication that we might bear some responsibility for our collective future.

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies
by Nick Frost
Published 7 Oct 2015

It’s still nice though, even a little edgy I guess if you’re a Danish teen on an exchange trip. Back then it was a dirty, dangerous breeding ground for bands and drugs and laughter and fighting. We’d walk around the stables for ages, buying T-shirts or new screens for the bongs or sunglasses. It made me feel like an extra in Blade Runner walking under the railway arches that heaved with tourists, Rastas, wide-eyed Ravers and backcombed Goths as we trawled the stalls looking for nice fresh falafel. It was exciting. Under the bridge by the lock was the place to go if you wanted to buy the shittest drugs in the world. The dealers were men used to cutting at thin tourists looking for something to blaze up through the window of their two-star Paddington flop house.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

She would—and what an incredible possibility!—feel no respect whatsoever for the rules by which her life played out. The idea of a mutinous artificial creature predates Haraway, of course: this is effectively the plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818; and of 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968; and of Blade Runner, released in 1982, and the late-sixties Philip K. Dick novel it was based on. But in recent years, this cyborg has been reappearing in specifically female form. In 2013, there was Her, the movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays a computer operating system who gets Joaquin Phoenix to fall in love with her.

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Published 7 Mar 2019

Rather than feed the algorithm random pixels, you could give it actual images and ask it to enhance the features it detected or invite it to play the game we’ve all played of staring up at the clouds: what can you see hidden in those puffy shapes? The algorithm was able to pick out features that seemed to correspond to a dog or a fish or perhaps a hybrid animal. The novel that would become the cult film Blade Runner was called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Using these algorithms, we can now find out! In one image produced by the algorithm, sheep did indeed begin to appear in the sky. More and more decisions are going to be taken out of human hands and placed in the digital hands of the algorithms we are making.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

That meant another brain surgery to remove the investigational device. She was unprepared to return to life before the implant. She did not consent to having the device removed, or to the brain surgery. “How are you supposed to recover these devices?” Gilbert asked me. “Do you hunt these people down? It becomes like something out of Blade Runner.”9 When radical new medical technologies are successful, the tech press reports breathlessly on paralyzed people who can eat grapes, or trial results that unlock another thing brain implants could ameliorate. But what happens when the trials are over? The tech press is a little harder to locate.

Step by Step the Life in My Journeys
by Simon Reeve
Published 15 Aug 2019

The city has some of the finest restaurants in the world, but instead of filling ourselves somewhere classy, we went for noodles in a night market which was also selling medical remedies made from honey mixed with cobra blood. A sign in English said: ‘The snakes sold and cooked at this store are definitely not protected animals. Welcome and taste!’ Clearly some other concerned travellers had been there before us. Taiwanese cities felt like cleaner versions of locations in Blade Runner. Neon signs lit skyscrapers and the night market, while girls from the Chinese mainland sat outside obvious brothels. To give you an idea of the options we would consider as a team when heading somewhere for filming, and the research I would put together as the presenter, I have dug out a document buried on my computer with the title ‘Taiwan things2do’.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

It is not practical or scalable and is antithetical to the cold, hard optimism of my thesis.43 As a platform politics, it also goes against the “robustness principle” that John Postel wrote into an early draft of a TCP/IP specifications document: “Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept from others.”44 Lastly, the real futures of our Cloud polities will be determined by extreme accidents at least as much by the execution of plans, and the coexistence of opposites as much as by the curation of ideals, and so whereas we might normally contrast the envisioned “clean future” (2001: A Space Odyssey's airport lounges, or Gattaca's dress code) from the “dirty future” (Blade Runner's streets of LA, or Mad Max's social contract of mayhem) as mutually exclusive, instead they actually depend on one other, each world drinking the wastewater of the other. It is utopia and dystopia, both at once. For every Cloud Polis, the reversibility of the utopian and the dystopian tracks with the reversibility of the enveloping line of interiority and exteriority.

…

Lab, 176 Banham, Reyner, 201, 280 banking, 123, 237, 336 Barlow, John Perry, 441n7 Barney, Matthew, 183 Bataille, Georges, 391n30 Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), 244 Baudrillard, Jean, 427n47 Beck, Glenn, 110 Beer, Stafford, 1, 58–61, 328 “Before the Law” (Kafka), 345 Beijing Airport, 181, 188 Bell, Gordon, 261–264 Benjamin, Solly, 439n66 Benjamin, Walter, 20, 225–226, 317, 320, 351, 391n30 Bergson, Henri, 191 Berlin, US embassy in, 322 Berlin Wall, 23 beyond the line, 30 Bible, The (App), 242–243 big data society, 89, 243, 270–271, 334 Big Society initiative (Cameron), 399n37 Bilbao effect, 180, 321, 410n50 bill of rights, 203, 362 biofundamentalists, 308 biogeopolitics, 269 bioinformational systems, 389n13 biological informationalism, 274 biological refashioning, 269 biology, architecture of, 196, 288 biomedical service providers, 285 biopolitical economy of space, 22, 141 biopolitical security, 288 biopolitics Foucauldian, 10, 251 polities of energy and, 92 of population medicine, 6 of privacy, 159, 360 of the statistical imaginary, 257 Biosphere 2, 315, 352, 456n6 Birth of Biopolitics, The (Foucault), 251 bitcoin, 9, 127, 171, 209, 336–337, 393n54 “Black Box, The” (Lem), 341 Black Stack defined, 368 design and, 359–365 The Stack and its others, 355–359 summary overview, 363–365 Blade Runner, 319 Bloch, Ernst, 321 Blomkamp, Neil, 311, 444n27 Blue Marble Earth, 144 blue marble photograph. See “Earthrise” photograph Bodin, Jean, 20 Bogdanov, Alexander, 328 bombs, Cold War, 325 Booz-Allen Hamilton, 121 borders. See also camp/enclave; walled gardens within airports, 155–156, 324 within cities, 311–312 conflicts, 9, 120, 144 economy of, 323 of enclosure and escape, 22, 32–33, 149–150, 172–176, 303 enforcing, 310 as envelope-interface, 172–173 formal and informal, 97 geopolitical geography of, 6–7, 97, 120, 144, 172–173, 308–310, 323–324, 409n42 globalization destabilizing and enforcing, 23 interfaces as, 220 Internet, 318 reversibility of, 23, 32–33, 148–149 of self, 262 software, 315 of technology, 29 virtual, 309 Borges, Jorge Luis, 209, 211, 363 Chinese Encyclopedia problem, 451n61 bots, 278, 344 boundaries of self, 262 Bourdieu, Pierre, 424n41 “Brain Is the Screen, The” (Deleuze), 219 brand, power of, 128, 130 Branzi, Andrea, 150–151 Brassier, Ray, 390n19 breach theory, 113 Brin, David, 454n75 Brin, Sergey, 139 Broad Museum, 320 bunker.

Geektastic: Stories From the Nerd Herd
by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
Published 1 Aug 2009

She is the author of Snow and Rx, and The Nine Lives of Chloe King as Celia Thomson, as well as numerous Disney Pirates of the Caribbean books. Geek creds, in no particular order: Favorite SF: old school. Favorite authors: Sturgeon, Bradbury, Clarke, Moore, Ian McDonald. Favorite movie: Blade Runner. Favorite Doctor: Fifth. Growing to love the Tenth. Favorite quote: “Where are we going? Planet 10!” Knows pi to 12 digits. Majored in Egyptology. Met husband at Star Trek convention. They were there as professionals: he published the Star Trek books, she produced Star Trek video games. Produced video games for ten years.

European Founders at Work
by Pedro Gairifo Santos
Published 7 Nov 2011

Basically we rented some space from Mat's brother, who was running a web agency in London in their basement. The agency was called Oyster at the time. It's now LBI, the big digital agency. We were basically their tenant in their basement. We cobbled together the beginnings of a library from some of the DVDs we had at home, my wife and I. Like Blade Runner and a couple of other things. We bought some secondhand DVDs from one of the partners that Redbus had introduced us to. A now defunct DVD rental business called Apollo that had like five or six stores in London. We didn't have to spend a lot of money on inventory. We put our heads down and we tried to get the site up.

The Docks
by Bill Sharpsteen
Published 5 Jan 2011

You can taste it and feel it. And here’s these mothers with infants, these children, the workers, the people that live there, on the sidewalks right next to this.╯.╯.╯. You know, to be honest, it’s not something my students or I could have ever imagined until we went down there. It’s like something out of Blade Runner.” It gets worse. As one might expect, the concentration of ultrafine particles peaks at the roadway, but these particles also linger in the air The Diesel Death Zoneâ•… /â•… 75 in a 984-foot swath along the roadside before sticking to other ultrafine particles in the air and becoming heavy enough to settle to the ground.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

The thought experiment poses this tough question: If, across experiments that randomly switch between a real person and a computer crouching behind the door, subjects can’t correctly tell human from machine more often than the 50 percent correctness one could get from guessing, would you then conclude that the computer, having thereby passed the test by proving it can trick people, is intelligent? I’ll give you a hint: There’s no right answer to this philosophical conundrum. In practice, computers fool people for money every day. If you don’t believe me, I have some Viagra I’d like to sell you via e-mail. It’s called spam. As with androids in science fiction movies like Aliens and Blade Runner, successful spam makes you believe. Spammy e-mail wants to bait you and switch. Phishing e-mail would have you divulge financial secrets. Spambots take the form of humans in social networks and dating sites in order to grab your attention. Spammy web pages trick search engines into pointing you their way.

Pandora's Brain
by Calum Chace
Published 4 Feb 2014

Very bright, and a committed contrarian, Carl occasionally succumbed to the temptation to show off with a clever remark that would have been better left unsaid. But he was also acutely perceptive, and on this occasion he knew instinctively that the right thing to do was to let his friend resume the conversation in his own time. ‘So . . . er, any plans for the weekend?’ Matt asked eventually. ‘Have to see the Blade Runner remake! Thought I might go along on Saturday afternoon. Interested?’ ‘Yeah, I guess,’ Matt agreed, unconvinced. ‘Seems a pointless thing to have done, but I guess we have to go.’ ‘It’ll make a lot of money,’ Carl replied, ‘if only because of reactions like that. The trailer looks good, and the original hasn’t aged all that well.

Misspent Youth
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 1 Jan 2002

There had been a lot of anger in James’s voice. For once the big man wasn’t happily slurping down his beer. Now what have I done? He’d come to the pub purely so he could get out of the manor. Life at home was not good right now. “Could be worse,” Alan mused. “The world could have turned out like it did in Blade Runner.” James took a long drink. “That would have been preferable.” “What the hell is up with you?” Jeff asked. “Nothing wrong with me. How about you?” Jeff couldn’t figure this out at all. “I’m fine, thank you.” “So we gather.” “You’re not seriously upset about me meeting that girl, are you?” James gave him a moody glare over the rim of his glass.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

An interesting—and somewhat contentious—concept is that we are potentially getting to the point where users of prosthetics no longer have a disability, but instead may have an advantage over so-called able-bodied humans. Let’s take a moment to consider this scenario. Prior to being convicted of culpable homicide related to the death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was better known as the “Blade Runner”. At Paralympic level, he holds multiple world records and medals for 400-metre, 4 x 400-metre relay, 100-metre, 4 x 100-metre and 200-metre distances. In 2011, Pistorius competed in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships in Athletics held in Daegu, South Korea, where he won a silver medal for the 4 x 400-metre men’s relay competing side by side with able-bodied athletes.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
by Scott Patterson
Published 11 Jun 2012

Smartly clad in a light blue cotton shirt and charcoal-gray suit, sans tie, a soft pink Credit Suisse logo illuminated on the wall behind him, Mathisson was pumped. He loved the Miami Beach conference. Over the years, it had become the Woodstock of electronic trading. Closed to the press, the March 10, 2011, gathering was a private congress of wealthy market wonks who’d created a fantastic Blade Runner trading world few outsiders could imagine, a worldwide matrix of dazzlingly complex algorithms, interlinked computer hubs the size of football fields, and high-octane trading robots guided by the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Mathisson was an alpha male of the electronic pack. In another life, the bespectacled five-seven onetime trader would have been teaching students quantum physics or working for Mission Control at NASA.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

Indeed, while it was true that the Net skipped lightly across national boundaries, the demise of localism didn’t automatically herald the arrival of a superior cyberworld. It simply accentuated and accelerated both the good and the bad, in effect becoming a mirror for all the world’s fantasies and foibles. Welcome to a bleak Blade Runner–esque world dominated by Russian, Ukrainian, Nigerian, and American cybermobsters, in which our every motion and movement is surveilled by a chorus of Big and Little Brothers. Not only have I been transformed into an Internet pessimist, but recently the Net has begun to feel downright spooky.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

I first talked to Sohrab about this work in the spring of 2006. 57 Daniel Pink, author: conversation between Roger Martin and Dan Pink, March 18, 2011, on Educating the Creative Leaders of Tomorrow, put on as part of the Steelcase 360 Discussion series. 58 In 1990, MIT roboticists: Like a lot of science-fiction-loving boys in America, I grew up intrigued by robots, and I wrote about industrial robots when I got to BusinessWeek. But the real story has been the disappointment with robots—how they have failed to live up to our Star Wars imagination. The little Roomba bots finally hit it. They opened up a new, commercial space with a robot. I believe we are now, finally, at the start of a new Robot Age. Time to see Blade Runner again. The history of iRobot, as well as success stories about Roomba and other products, can be found on the company’s website; “Our History,” iRobot, accessed September 4, 2012, http://www.irobot.com/en/us/ Company/About/Our_History.aspx. 59 there’s even a smallish cult: http://hackingroomba.com, accessed October 5, 2012. 60 Early advocates of this approach: I interviewed Lafley in 2006 for the BusinessWeek cover story “The Power of Design.”

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Where else, I wonder, will you find research groups with titles like Affective Computing, Biomechatonics, eRationality, Information Ecology, Lifelong Kindergarten, Smart Cities, and, sharing the same lab space as Cynthia’s Personal Robotics Group, Opera of the Future (this last looks at ‘how musical composition, performance, and instrumentation can lead to innovative forms of expression, learning, and health’), all nestled up against one another? It’s bonkers, in all the right ways. It’s also an unholy mess. Cynthia’s lab reminds me of the scene in Blade Runner when genetic designer J. F. Sebastian returns to his apartment – a chaotic jumble of rooms, strewn with antiques and machine parts, and inhabited by comical pet creatures of his own design. As I enter, the plastic skeleton of a small robot sitting on a desk covered with computer parts raises its gaze from Ph.D. student Dan Stiehl to look at me.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2007

Outside Magazine Online Free Archives (http://outside.away.com) The entire archive of Outside magazine available online for free. From meditation camps to worldwide adrenaline hotspots, dream jobs to Patagonia winter highlights, there are hundreds of articles with beautiful photos to give you the walkabout itch. GridSkipper: The Urban Travel Guide (www.gridskipper.com) For those who love Blade Runner-like settings and exploring the cool nooks and crannies of cities worldwide, this is the site. It is one of Forbes’s Top 13 Travel sites and is “high-falootin’ and low-brow all in the same breath” (Frommer’s). Translation: Much of the content is not G-rated. If four-letter words or a “world’s sluttiest city” poll bother you, don’t bother visiting this site (or Rio de Janeiro, for that matter).

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2008

Sixty years in the life of a city that, like Chongqing, is 1,500 years old might seem like nothing—London has changed dramatically in its past six decades, as have Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Rome: yet in their essence these western cities are still today much the same as they always were, recognizable physically, familiar in the way they feel, sound, and smell. But this is manifestly not so for Chongqing: the same interval has brought about for this city changes few other urban centers in the world have ever experienced, creating a future world, part Blade Runner, part Shinjuku, part Dickensian London, that is profoundly unrecognizable, a place to take away one’s breath. The entire municipal entity that is known as Chongqing incorporates both the crowded inner city and an officially city-governed semirural hinterland, the two together occupying about the same area as Maine, a little bit less than Austria, slightly more than Tasmania.

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

If you do so much as raise a camera to your face in its vicinity, an angry man in a uniform will charge up to you and let you get a very good look at the bayonet fixed to the end of his automatic weapon. So let me try to convey what it is like: The adjective Blade-Runneresque means much to those who have seen the movie. (For those who haven’t, just keep reading.) I will, however, never again be able to watch Blade Runner, because all of the buildings that looked so cool, so exquisitely art-directed in the movie, will now, to me, look like feeble efforts to capture a few traces of ARENTO’s Alexandria station at night. The building is a titanic structure that goes completely dark at night and becomes a maze of black corridors that appear to stretch on into infinity.

Lonely Planet's Best of USA
by Lonely Planet

. (%310-374-9344; 11 Pier Ave; h10am-10:30pm) Nic’s Beverly Hills Bar Map Google Map Martinis for every palate lure the cocktail crowd to upscale, but fun-loving, Nic’s, the only decent watering hole in all of Beverly Hills, where the libations and crowd range from the colorful and sassy to the no-frills and classy. (Map; %310-550-5707; www.nicsbeverlyhills.com; 453 N Canon Dr; h4pm-midnight Mon-Wed, to 2am Thu-Sat) Edison Bar Map Google Map Metropolis meets Blade Runner at this industrial-chic basement boîte where you’ll be sipping mojitos surrounded by turbines and other machinery back from its days as a boiler room. Don’t worry, it’s all tarted up nicely with cocoa leather couches and three cavernous bars. No athletic wear, flip-flops or baggy jeans tolerated.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

It has reportedly “aggressively courted” the fossil fuel industry, signing contracts with BP, Shell, and Halliburton to provide machine learning services to enhance exploration and oilfield automation and help create what its marketing arms call the “oil fields of the future” — proposing to archive the data, without apparent irony, on its “Amazon Glacier” file storage system.373 * * * While in Delhi, I spend several days following what I think of as the long, hidden tail at the far end of the supply chain: what happens to electronic equipment after it is no longer working. I meet up with Nilanjan Chowdhury, a senior producer in India’s Al Jazeera office and someone who has covered the topic locally. Our first stop is a shopping area near his offices in Delhi’s Nehru Place neighbourhood, which I can only describe as a kind of Blade Runner–style street bazaar. Crowds filter through a seemingly endless number of small shops and electronics stalls. There are people selling only pirated printer cartridges or motherboards. Others, nothing but replacement glass screens for damaged smartphones. Here and there are makeshift stands selling discounted SIM cards.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

“A battling defeat at the hands of Eidos’s Chairman (in the face of the superior table-footballing skills) would’ve been just the ticket. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere, though. A game is a game, after all. I won 6–3.” The diary seemed to look beyond Elixir, toward his next venture. The first entry began with him sitting in a plush chair at home, listening to the musical score from Blade Runner (track twelve, “Tears in Rain,” on continuous repeat). Much as Stanley Kubrick inspired a young Yann LeCun in the late ’60s, Ridley Scott had captured the imagination of a young Hassabis in the early ’80s with this latter-day sci-fi classic, in which a scientist and his imperious corporation build machines that behave like humans.

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe
by Paul Sen
Published 16 Mar 2021

In this paper he introduced “the imitation game,” the idea that if a computer provides answers that are indistinguishable from those that a human might provide to a given series of questions, the computer should for all intents and purposes be treated as human. Now known as the Turing Test, this idea of the imitation game has become embedded in popular culture due to a scene in the 1982 film Blade Runner where a detective asks the person opposite him a series of questions and, based on his answers, evaluates whether he is a human or an android. The paper in Mind demonstrates Turing’s long-term interest in the following question: If “dumb” electrical circuits in a computer could perform mathematical tasks previously only carried out by human minds, was it possible that similar “dumb” processes ultimately underpinned all the ways those minds worked?

Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle
Published 16 Jan 2024

In the Principia, he correctly showed that the tides depend on both the gravitational attraction of the Moon, like Kepler said, and centrifugal forces caused by the Moon-Earth orbit. *52 In a nod to Aristotle, Plutarch, and Saint Augustine. *53 Where to even begin? Here are just a handful of selections. For allegorical treatment of ethnicity and fear of otherness, see Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as well as its film adaptations, both Blade Runner movies. For good stories about borders, citizenship, and fascism, see Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. For stories about ethics, otherness, and equal rights, see Isaac Asimov, I, Robot. For frank treatment of climate-driven mass migration and segregation based on race and homosexuality, read N.

Coastal California
by Lonely Planet

It adjoins La Placita (Our Lady Queen of Angels Church; Click here ; 535 N Main St; 8am-8pm), built in 1822 and a sentimental favorite with LA’s Latino community. Peek inside for a look at the gold-festooned altar and painted ceiling. Union Station LANDMARK (800 N Alameda St; ) This majestic 1939 edifice is the last of America’s grand rail stations; its glamorous art deco interior can be seen in Blade Runner, Bugsy, Rain Man and many other movies. Chinese American Museum CULTURAL MUSEUM ( 213-485-8567; www.camla.org; 425 N Los Angeles St; adult/student/senior $3/2/2; 10am-3pm Tue-Sun) This small but smart museum is on the site of an early Chinese apothecary and general store, and exhibits probe questions of identity.

…

Silver Fox (www.silverfoxlongbeach.com; 411 Redondo Ave, Long Beach) Despite its name, all ages frequent this mainstay of gay Long Beach, especially on karaoke nights. It is a short drive from shopping on Retro Row. DOWNTOWN Edison BAR (www.edisondowntown.com; 108 W 2nd St, enter off Harlem Alley; 5pm-2am Wed-Fri, 6pm-2am Sat) Metropolis meets Blade Runner at this industrial-chic basement boîte, where you’ll sip mojitos surrounded by turbines from Edison’s days as a boiler room. It’s all tarted up nicely with cocoa leather couches and three cavernous bars. No athletic wear, flip-flops or baggy jeans. Seven Grand BAR (www.sevengrand.la; 515 W 7th St) It’s as if hipsters invaded mummy and daddy’s hunt club, amid the tartan-patterned carpeting and deer heads on the walls.

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 31 Mar 2009

are still the subject of lively, and sometimes vitriolic, debate. The idea of creating artificial life is also very old, going back at least two millennia to legends of the Golem and of Ovid’s Pygmalion, continuing in the nineteenth-century story of Frankenstein’s monster, all the way to the present era of movies such as Blade Runner and The Matrix, and computer games such as “Sim Life.” These works of fiction both presage and celebrate a new, technological version of the “What is life?” question: Is it possible for computers or robots to be considered “alive”? This question links the previously separate topics of computation and of life and evolution.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford
Published 1 Jan 2006

Steve Belmont, Cities in Full: Recognizing and Realizing the Great Potential of Urban America (Chicago: Planners, 2002), p. 102. 65. Vergara, New American Ghetto, p. 211. 66. Ibid., pp. 211, 215. 67. Belmont, Cities in Full, pp. 90–91. 68. Ibid., pp. 93, 98. 69. Ibid., pp. 103–4. 70. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 224, 228. See also Mike Davis, Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control and the Ecology of Fear, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, no. 23 (Westfield, N.J.: Open Media, 1992), and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Holt, 1998); and Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 298–322.

Little Failure: A Memoir
by Gary Shteyngart
Published 7 Jan 2014

Men with smaller dicks enter the shower. The complaining begins. “There’s too much reading for English!” “Ganzel assigned an entire book to read!” “I had to write two papers in one week.” The Stuyvesant graduate in me is amused. During my first semester at Oberlin my longest assignment is watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and then writing a paper describing my feelings about the same. Students, townspeople, and other assorted losers are allowed to teach courses at Oberlin as part of the Experimental College. These classes are for actual college credit. The nice sophomore hippie next door teaches an introductory course on the Beatles, which consists of us listening to Revolver, getting the munchies real bad, and then ordering in a Hawaiian pizza with ham and pineapple from Lorenzo’s (oh, the famished thirty minutes until the damn thing arrives).

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

Rather than try to duplicate the efficiency of their driving practices with computers, we might instead look to such practices to remind ourselves what human beings are capable of, when left to their own devices. This becomes a meditation on the meaning of self-government. I believe it is in this vicinity that we should look if we want to understand why self-driving cars play prominent roles in several dystopian films, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and WALL-E. In these films, drivers have become passengers and appear as a new class of administrative subjects to be managed. I use the word “subject” to mean both an object of political rule and the type of person—the form of subjectivity—that is assumed or required by such rule, and thereby brought into existence.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

But all of this raises a fundamental question: Why now? Why, in the late spring of 2018, are flying cars suddenly ready for prime time? What is it about this particular moment in history that has turned one of our oldest science fiction fantasies into our latest reality? After all, we’ve been dreaming of Blade Runner hover cars and Back to the Future DeLorean DMC-12s for millennia. Vehicles capable of flight date back to the “flying chariots” in the Ramayana, an eleventh-century Hindu text. Even the more modern incarnations—that is, ones built around the internal combustion engine—have been around for a while.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

They include Mexico (such as Guillermo del Toro, who directed The Shape of Water), South Africa (for instance, Neill Blomkamp of District 9 fame), New Zealand (Peter Jackson, who did The Lord of the Rings) and Chile (Alejandro Amenábar, who directed The Others). Sicario was directed by French Canadian Denis Villeneuve. The many British directors in Hollywood include Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner). James Cameron, arguably Hollywood’s most successful director – he directed both Avatar, the second-highest grossing film of all time, and Titanic, the third-highest – is Canadian.16 Avatar starred Australian actor Sam Worthington, while Leonardo DiCaprio’s co-star in Titanic was Kate Winslet, a Brit.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Under my no-lying policy, I wrote “protest” as the reason for my time-off request. Lalo approved it but looked at me like I was insane, then asked out of nowhere whether I had kids. Afterward, so many coworkers also asked out of nowhere if it was true that I didn’t have kids that I suspect gossip may have pegged me as frivolous. * Including but not limited to: The Hustler, Blade Runner, Heathers, The Handmaiden, True Grit, and, oh, god, The Piano. I don’t even bother with anything involving David Cronenberg or the yakuza. * Something I’ve totally done, by the way. * I later learn that managerial bonuses are frequently handed out based on metrics like this. * Since the 2016 election, I’ve taken to sampling a wide spectrum of political podcasts, from hard right to hard left, to get a better idea of how different people are interpreting the news.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

Films like Her, Ex Machina, and AI: Artificial Intelligence (the last of which notably features a male sex bot, Jude Law as Gigolo Joe) and TV series like Westworld and the United Kingdom’s Humans all depict this captivation with the sexualization of robots. And before those came The Stepford Wives and Blade Runner. Hollywood, for the most part, has a pattern—a theme of the fantasy of the controllable, pliable woman. And the catch, of course, is the fear that they might rise up, unlock their chains, and become independent. But let’s go back in time for a moment, to a period when sex robots were not yet around.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

The earliest appearance I can locate is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the navigational displays of both the Orion III spaceplane and the exploration vessel Discovery relied heavily on the trope—this, presumably, because in the fictional universe of the film they were produced by the same contractor, IBM. See also the Nostromo’s orbital contours in Alien (1979), Pete Shelley’s music video for “Homosapien” (1981), and the traverse corridors projected through the sky of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles (1982). 9.Gunter Demnig, Stolpersteine: Here Lived 1933–1945, An Art Project for Europe, 2009, stolpersteine.eu/en/. 10.Steven Cherry, “Steve Mann’s Better Version of Reality,” IEEE Spectrum, March 8, 2013. 11.Richard Holloway, “Registration Errors in Augmented Reality,” Ph.D. dissertation.

The Rough Guide to Toronto
by Helen Lovekin and Phil Lee
Published 29 Apr 2006

If you have a car and crave that quintessential North American experience of the drive-in movie, the Dock’s has double bills nightly at dusk, as long as there’s not snow. Paramount 259 Richmond St W, Downtown T416/368-5600. Streetcar: Queen (#501). Perfect venue for filmgoers who want to feel like extras in Blade Runner. Half the spectacle is in the theatre itself, with a mammoth pixel-board cube showing film clips to the club-hoppers outside, an almost verticle ride up the escalator to the cinemas and, of course, a sound system that will blast you out of your seat. The complex also houses an IMAX theatre. Rainbow Market Square 80 Front St E, at Church St, Downtown T416/494-9371.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

Are we now in a new era of intelligent machines? It’s time to grow up as we consider this issue. This year’s contributors to the Edge Question (there are close to 200 of them!) are a grown-up bunch and have eschewed mention of all that science fiction and all those movies: Star Maker, Forbidden Planet, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, “The Borg.” And eighty years after Alan Turing introduced his Universal Machine, it’s time to honor Turing and other AI pioneers by giving them a well-deserved rest. We know the history. (See, for instance, George Dyson’s 2004 Edge feature, “Turing’s Cathedral.”) What’s going on NOW?

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker
by Anthony Lane
Published 26 Aug 2002

If you wanted cool new movies, you watched Jaws seventeen times, and, rather than rush to The Empire Strikes Back, you treated yourself to the grownup horrors of Alien. Lucas couldn’t give us a human being to rival Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, let alone an android in the same league as the replicants of Blade Runner, and the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind could have blown a fleet of Imperial star cruisers out of the sky. I wonder whether the prerelease fuss over The Phantom Menace, which has surely been greater than the sum of all the fusses that surrounded the earlier episodes, will prove to be nothing more than the last, ludicrous gasp of seventies retro-chic—Boogie Nights for the sci-fi crowd, with the prosthetics in different places.

…

There are times when Gladiator appears to be not so much photographed as cast in iron: gray-blue skies, flesh as cold and colorless as the armor that protects it, and hardened profiles that you could stamp on a coin. I spent half the movie trying to work out what the computerized Rome reminded me of, and then I clicked; it was Albert Speer’s designs for the great Berlin of the future. Scott’s is hardly a fascist film, but it is insanely watchable in ways that set you fretting; like his own Blade Runner, it makes you desperate to know the worst—to see what extremes this poisoned world can stretch to. When one gladiator has another pinned on the ground like an insect, he asks the emperor to decide the fallen man’s fate by the raising or lowering of a thumb. The mob does its best to sway his choice, which leaves us with the disconcerting spectacle of multiple, raving, Latin-speaking Siskels and Eberts—forty thousand thumbs way down.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

Like city lights, receding.44 Gibson’s novels had their own aesthetic. People lived in sprawling cityscapes, crammed and gritty and dark. Washed-up computer cowboys and hustlers with alien tattoos, shades, and neural implants that were blurring the line between human body and machine part. The stories had an apocalyptic feel, like Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult film Blade Runner or The Matrix, a 1999 film directed by the Wachowskis. Gibson romanticized the technology. When he shaped the language and the aesthetic of cyberpunk, he didn’t even know that hard drives had spinning disks. “Fortunately I knew absolutely nothing about computers,” he recalled.45 Until late in 1985, the fêted science fiction author and creator of cyberspace didn’t even own a personal computer.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

Nearly ten years after Jobs’s promise, I’m barreling down the highway between the Shanghai Pudong airport and the city’s commercial district, and the cabdriver keeps passing his device back to me over the plastic partition. We take turns speaking into a translation app. “No. Not Shang hi. Hang zoo.” Smog softens Shanghai’s neon glow. From here, the skyline is a Blade Runner screenshot: brilliant, contorted skyscrapers gracefully recede into a polluted haze. Our digitally stilted but mostly comprehensible conversation veers from how his night’s been (okay) to how long he’s been driving a cab (eight years) to the economic conditions of the city (getting worse). “The pry says keep rising.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod
Published 2 Nov 2013

We were looking at old promotional prints of outline drawings of the central area produced by Mike Evans in the early sixties, well before construction began: drawings showing people busy pushing prams, pulling tartan shoppers or gazing down at the cars gliding through the centre of the structure on the A80. They had that jarring, off-key quality all images of the future from the past have, bizarrely evoking a Blade Runner cityscape peopled by characters from a Gary Larson cartoon. ‘These were published in Architectural Review,’ recalled Tom. ‘I was at Strathclyde University at the time and these seemed absolutely fantastic.’ Tom was softly spoken but expansive, some years younger than Ken, but twice his size, and dressed formally in a dark lounge suit.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

A much lauded advertisement for Coca-Cola that ran during the 1979 Super Bowl featured an enormous African American football player, Mean Joe Greene, being offered a Coke by a young white boy.22 And in 1984, Apple Computer ran its “Big Brother” advertisement during the Super Bowl to great acclaim. Directed by Blade Runner auteur Ridley Scott, it portrayed a young woman running and smashing a giant screen to save society from a totalitarian overlord. “On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” the advertisement proclaimed. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ” The publicity created by its advertising, at least according to Apple, sold $3.5 million of its new Macintoshes.23 In retrospect, the word “remote control” was ultimately a misnomer.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

The Bradbury’s celebration of transparency was also stunningly unlike what Pei had aimed for; the physical workings of his building were secreted from view, and—concealed and ignored—tended to be much more prone to failure. The Bradbury Building was a living organism; the Media Lab, a lifeless one. The Bradbury had been revived several times, including an eerie back-to-the-future cameo in the movie Blade Runner. The sort of building Brand favored was one, like MIT’s Building 20, that shaped and reshaped itself over time. Brand saw that sort of practice all over, but not among modernist architects and their clients. With them, formidability took precedence over humanity. The failure of architects and planners to look beyond the moment, to consider what would happen, say, once the snow piled up on the roof (the Frank Lloyd Wright example)—this was not so different from what Brand had seen in the army, what he had seen in the American government’s policies toward the natural world, what he had seen in the Sausalito evictions, and on and on: the triumph of inefficiency disguised as proficiency, the demand for automation at the price of autonomy.

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley
Published 22 Jul 2009

SUPER-MODEL, SUPER-RICH Naomi Campbell with boyfriend Vladimir Doronin, a Russian billionaire property developer, on his yacht in the south of France in the summer of 2008. WEALTH ON THE WATER Pelorus, the pride of Abramovich’s fleet of floating palaces, in St Petersburg with St Isaac’s, the landmark Russian orthodox church, in the background. BLADE RUNNER Most oligarchs love helicopters, mainly for commuting to and from the office. This one was used while Abramovich was on holiday in Sardinia in 2008. FLIGHT CAPITAL This Boeing 767, which Abramovich bought for £55 million, has been compared to the US President’s Air Force One. It has the same air missile avoidance system and has room for 30 seated dining guests.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia. Computers and hackers were countercultural rebels taking on power. They were cool. That same year, Apple Computer released its “1984” ad for the Macintosh. Directed by Ridley Scott, who had just wowed audiences with the dystopian hit Blade Runner, and aired during the Super Bowl, Apple’s message could not have been more clear: forget what you know about IBM or corporate mainframes or military computer systems. With Apple at the helm, personal computers are the opposite of what they used to be: they are not about domination and control but about individual rebellion and empowerment.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

Here, however, comes an important moment in the story, one that has crept into the narrative all too stealthily. The making of high-pressure turbine blades has long required the absolute concentration of legions of workers, men and women with decades of experience in hand-eye coordination and a studiously learned degree of extreme manual dexterity. These “blade runners,” as it were, have for years past learned to manage, for instance, the complexities and eccentricities of the cooling-hole drilling machines—and the more complex the engines, the more holes need to be drilled into the various surfaces of a single blade: in a Trent XWB engine, there are some six hundred, arranged in bewildering geometries to ensure that the blade remains stiff, solid, and as cool as possible.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Also in attendance at each CFP are certain colorful and irrepressible Net aficionados who call themselves “cypherpunks,” partly from cipher, a class of secret coding techniques, and in part as a tribute to cyberpunk authors of vivid, hard-boiled science fiction stories—William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and others —whose tales are often filled with glossy images of computerized gadgetry, set in near-future worlds more dour and forbidding than Blade Runner. Cypherpunks enthusiastically promote the notion that widespread use of encryption will help ensure freedom in the coming electronic age. Among the invited attendees at both CFP 95 and CFP 97 were envoys of major corporations, including many involved in the credit and banking industries. Others came from companies that specialize in gathering, collating, and selling data about average Americans.

Underground
by Suelette Dreyfus
Published 1 Jan 2011

Any spotty, gawky teenage boy could instantly transform himself into a suave, graceful BBS character. The transformation began with the choice of name. In real life, you might be stuck with the name Elliot Dingle – an appellation chosen by your mother to honour a long-dead great uncle. But on a BBS, well, you could be Blade Runner, Ned Kelly or Mad Max. Small wonder that, given the choice, many teenage boys chose to spend their time in the world of the BBS. Generally, once a user chose a handle, as the on-line names are known, he stuck with it. All his electronic mail came to an account with that name on it. Postings to bulletin boards were signed with it.

Game Over Press Start to Continue
by David Sheff and Andy Eddy
Published 1 Jan 1993

They hired Barry Morrow, who cowrote Rain Man, to write a script, and a series of rewrite men were brought in. The directing team of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, creators of the original Max Headroom film for British television, was signed up. The production designer was David Snyder, whose impressive credits included Blade Runner and Peewee’s Big Adventure. The Nintendo movie went into production in May 1992 for a May 1993 release—without Danny DeVito, who had ultimately turned down the part of Mario. After all the talk about Hoffman and DeVito (Hoffman’s agency, Creative Artists, says he never considered the part), Nintendo had to start from scratch.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Slick and hollow—awaiting received meaning” (153). Although the technologies Gibson describes may belong to the future, the anger and anxiety that pervade the novel belong to the historical moment of its creation. The social and technological chaos of Neuromancer can be seen in many popular stories of the early and middle 1980s, including Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984), and First Blood (the first Rambo film, 1982). 59. Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” 95 –99. 60. Barlow, “Being in Nothingness,” 38. See also Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” 98 –99; King, “Cultural Construction of Cyberspace,” 162; Rushkoff, Cyberia, 41– 45. 61.

Rome
by Lonely Planet

Saturday is the popular ‘Gorgeous, I am’ gay night, with lots of go-go dancers and guest DJs. Distillerie Clandestine Nightclub Offline map Google map ( 06 573 05 102; www.distillerieclandestine.com; Via Libetta 13; 11.30pm-4am Thu-Sun Sep-May; Piramide) A club-bar-restaurant that has a 1930s-meets-Blade Runner decor and keeps the punters dancing with a mix of house, dance and hip hop. As well as a restaurant, there’s a ship-shaped American bar lit by a tangle of neon tubes suspended above it. Goa Nightclub Offline map Google map ( 06 574 82 77; Via Libetta 13; 11pm-4.30am Tue-Sun Oct-May; Garbatella) Rome’s serious super-club, with international names (recent guests include Satoshi Tomiie and M.A.N.D.Y.), a fashion-forward crowd, podium dancers and heavies on the door.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

“I mean, his whole thing of knowing exactly what he’s going to say, but up on stage saying it in such a way that he is trying to make you think he’s thinking it up right then …” Gates just laughs. Making the “1984” ad with Steve was a pirate enterprise for creative director Clow, art director Brenton Thomas, and Steve Hayden, who wrote the copy. Steve didn’t let the board see the ad until a couple of days before the Super Bowl, and they were horrified. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott, the sixty-second spot features a lone woman, in color, running through a sea of gray men and women listening obediently to a huge talking head nattering threateningly from an enormous screen about the enlightened potential of absolute conformity. As the ad nears its end, the woman hurls the large hammer she’s been carrying and smashes the screen.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

To put their dilemma in contemporary terms, it was as if you were forced to arm yourself today with a new type of weapon, but the cost of doing so was $100,000. If you could not pay that price, you would be at the mercy of those who could. Within a few years, the capacity of the king and the courts to enforce order collapsed. 31 Anyone with armor and a horse could now become a law unto himself. The result was a late-tenth-century version of Blade Runner, a melee of fighting and plunder that the constituted authorities were powerless to stop. Looting and attacks by armed knights disrupted the countryside. It is by no means obvious, however, that all the victims of this pillage were the poor. To the contrary, the elderly, physically weaker, or ill-prepared among the larger landholders made more attractive targets.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

Neuromancer is indeed the novel that introduced readers to cyberspace when it was completed and published in 1984, but it is also a novel about a rogue artificial intelligence. It thus pays tribute to the already long tradition in science fiction of stories about computers breaking bad (or breaking free), even as it also helped usher in the cyberpunk genre, the near-future noir settings first glimpsed by many in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982). It also resonated with another film released that same year, Walt Disney’s Tron: Like that garish neon fable of a hapless hero forced through the looking glass to do battle with a malevolent computer program on its own silicon turf, Gibson’s novel imagined the world inside a computer, or—more precisely—an all-encompassing environment derived from the totality of our world’s networked computers.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

London has long been like this but these vast disparities, of wealth, background and behaviour, became more extreme under Labour, not least because Blair hugely increased immigration and actively liked the idea of cultural diversity. Most of my contemporaries found it exciting and liberating, while I just thought we were going to end up like Brazil, a Blade Runner-like dystopia with walls separating luxury villas from hellish slums. Because the City money flowed in, Labour could avoid reforming the benefit system and push more people into low-paid jobs, which instead went to less troublesome and keener migrants. It was certainly the easier thing to do; welfare fraud in the greater scheme of things accounts for only a small total, and a wealthy country can easily handle it.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

First, he inserted an ironic copyright notice: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.” This string illustrated his love of heavy-metal music. “Eddie” refers to the skeletal mascot of the band Iron Maiden; Somewhere in Time is the name of Iron Maiden’s sixth album, in which Eddie appears on the cover as a muscular cyborg in a Blade Runner setting, next to graffiti that reads, “Eddie lives.” Dark Avenger went on to write more viruses. And each virus was more sophisticated than the last. The viruses were so contagious that they infiltrated the computers of the military, banks, insurance companies, and medical offices around the world.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

Cyberdyne is a government contractor that started out as a computer manufacturer based in Sunnyvale, California, a real town, sandwiched between Mountain View and Cupertino, where Google and Apple are headquartered, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The replicants in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and its film adaptation, Blade Runner, meanwhile, are artificially intelligent robot slaves built by the Tyrell Corporation to perform dangerous manual labor. They revolt when they near the end of their preprogrammed lifespans, becoming violent out of desperation to outlast their corporate-engineered lives. The replicants may be the purest science fictional distillation of the Luddites; working-class laborers facing technological obsolescence, they desperately and violently take up arms against the force that is oppressing them.

Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV
by Peter Biskind
Published 6 Nov 2023

“He was an arrogant and vindictive bully who tried to intimidate grown men into subservience,” said a Warner Music executive in The Los Angeles Times, a characterization with which Fuchs would probably agree.50 According to Fuchs, “Jerry was like Stalin. He didn’t want Trotsky anymore. It was almost like Jerry had to sever me because I knew too much about him. You don’t want anyone near you who knows who you are. It’s like having a mirror following you around. He really played me. Remember the replicants in Blade Runner? If I had walked into Jerry’s office and he was taking his face off, I swear to God, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This was a bloodless, heartless guy. To take down people more powerful than him in terms of personality, is probably incredibly exciting. I always tell people it’s the only way he can get an erection.”51 One of Fuchs’s final acts at HBO in 1995, before he himself left, was firing Potter.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
by Sarah Bakewell
Published 1 Mar 2016

A vague longing for a more ‘real’ way of living leads some people to — for example — sign up for weekend retreats in which their smartphones are taken away like toys from children, so that they can spend two days walking in the country landscape and reconnecting with each other and with their forgotten selves. The unnamed object of desire here is authenticity. This theme also haunts modern entertainment, just as much as it did in the 1950s. Existential anxiety is more closely intertwined with technological anxiety than ever in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Existentialist heroes of more traditional kinds, wrestling with meaning and decision, feature in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, Steven Knight’s Locke, and any number of Woody Allen films, including Irrational Man which takes its title from William Barrett’s book.

Berlin
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 20 Oct 2010

Red lights, stuffed animals and bizarregewgaws give the cellar club the slowly disappearing trashy charm of the 1990s. On Thursdays, drag queen Chantal brings her House of Shame gay party to this den of darkness. BERGHAIN/PANORAMA BAR Map www.berghain.de, in German; Am Wriezener Bahnhof, Friedrichshain; cover €12; from midnight Fri & Sat; Ostbahnhof Metropolis meets Blade Runner at Berlin’s legendary electro club that heats up the raw industrial labyrinth of an ex–power plant pretty much nonstop from midnight Friday to mid-morning Monday. Once you’ve made it past the pierced and tattooed doorman (hello Sven!), surrender to a hedonistic cauldron of ravers, students, fashion designers, naughty girls, hip grandmas, gay muscle buddies, trash drags and wild tourists.

Fodor's Rome: With the Best City Walks and Scenic Day Trips
by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.
Published 24 Sep 2012

In her early 20s, Delfina Delettrez creates edgy, conceptual collections. Using human body–inspired pieces blending skulls, wild animals, and botanical elements, she daringly merges gold, silver, bone and glass, crystals and diamonds to create gothic, edgy styles worthy of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Blade Runner. Don’t be put off by her signature goth-glam designs in the window: this dazzling emporium, with its innumerable drawers filled with baubles, has something saucy and refined for everyone’s sensibilities. | Via Governo Vecchio 67, Navona | 00186 | 06/68136362 | www.delfinadelettrez.com. MMM—Massimo Maria Melis.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer
Published 31 Mar 2021

He sings ‘Daisy Bell’ (‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…’) ostensibly because this was the first song ever performed by a computer, an IBM 704 in 1962.2 The HAL in the Simpsons parody regresses from Queen’s English to American vernacular.3 The fascinating puzzle is why machines become more human when they begin to die. Vangelis’s electro-pop score to Blade Runner waxes most lyrical during the replicant Rutger Hauer’s ‘tears in rain’ death scene. Electronic music creates expression through glitches, flashes of technical breakdown. This aesthetic of failure and decay is at the heart of chillwave, vaporwave and hauntology, contemporary music genres preoccupied with dated or lo-fi technology.4 Don’t ever believe the myth that machines can’t express emotion.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

If they wanted to sign up for a contract, that was okay, too, and Google expected Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T to offer big phone discounts for those who wanted a more traditional arrangement. The phone itself would be called Nexus One. “Nexus,” explained Queiroz, “is a convergence of connections.” But the real origin of the name was Andy Rubin’s robot fixation: in the movie Blade Runner, the model name of one of the humanlike robots was Nexus 6. “We’re not at six yet, we’re at one,” said Queiroz. “This is our first device.” Inside Google, however, there was a different code name: the Passion Device. Google’s playbook had gaps. One of them was customer support. Though buyers of $500 phones were accustomed to having human beings accessible on help lines when something went wrong, that concept was alien to Google.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Deng is the father of Shenzhen, having chosen this sleepy fishing village as the first of China’s “special economic zones” in 1980. Foreign firms were invited to open shop here with few constraints or taxes, triggering the transformation of the Pearl River Delta into “the factory of the world” and Shenzhen into the “Overnight City,” having grown two-hundred-fold since then. While Shanghai’s Blade Runner landscape symbolizes China’s future, Shenzhen is the template for its instant cities. Until the crisis, the Delta was the world’s biggest boomtown, crowding 5 percent of China’s population into less than 1 percent of its land, where they produced 20 percent of the country’s GDP and 40 percent of its exports.

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time
by Stephen Fried
Published 23 Mar 2010

All her handmade wood restaurant furniture is gone, but Colter’s curved ceilings, her light fixtures, and that amazing faux-Navajo-rug tile floor are in immaculate condition, as are the circular red leather booths and the curved copper bar in the upstairs cocktail lounge. The space is no longer open to the public, but justifies its existence by being rented out for bar mitzvahs, weddings, and film shoots. (It was used as the police station set in Blade Runner.) Because the train arrives many hours late in Los Angeles, we are forced to dash through Union Station because we have a plane to catch. We get a cab to LAX and begin the cycle of rushed indignities that are modern air travel: the lines to get boarding passes, then the lines to get into the queue for security check, all so we can finally board the plane, take a crammed seat less comfortable than the one in the train “shoilet,” breathe pre-used air, and eat stale mini-pretzels from tiny, shiny bags.

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

Downtown Los Angeles Top Sights Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels D2 El Pueblo de Los Angeles E2 Grammy Museum A5 Museum of Contemporary Art D3 Walt Disney Concert Hall D3 Sights 1 Avila AdobeE2 2 Bradbury Building D4 3 Chinese American Museum E3 4 City Hall E3 5 Geffen Contemporary at MOCAE4 6 Japanese American National MuseumE4 7 LA Live A5 8 La Plaza de Cultura y Artes E2 9 MOCA Grand Avenue D3 10Union StationF3 Sleeping 11 Figueroa Hotel A4 12 Standard Downtown LA C4 Eating 13 Bottega Louie C4 14 Daikokuya E4 15 Empress Pavilion E1 16 Gorbals C4 17 Grand Central Market D4 18 Nickel Diner D4 19 Philippe the Original E2 Drinking 20 EdisonD4 Rooftop Lounge@Standard Downtown LA(see 12) 21 Seven Grand C4 Entertainment 22Ahmanson TheatreD2 23 Bob Baker Marionette Theater B1 24 Los Angeles Opera D2 25 Los Angeles Philharmonic D3 26 Mark Taper ForumD2 27Nokia TheatreA5 28 Orpheum Theater C5 29 Staples Center A5 Shopping 30 Tokyo E4 La Plaza de Cultura y Artes MUSEUM Offline map Google map ( www.lapca.org; 501 Main St; adult/child $9/5; noon-7pm Wed-Sun; ) This new (opened 2010) chronicles the Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles, in exhibits about city history from the Zoot Suit Riots to the Chicana movement. Calle Principal re-creates Main St in the 1920s. Union Station LANDMARK Offline map ( 800 N Alameda St; ) This majestic 1939 edifice is the last of America’s grand rail stations; its glamorous art-deco interior can be seen in Blade Runner, Bugsy, Rain Man and many other movies. Chinese American Museum MUSEUM Offline map Google map ( 213-485-8567; www.camla.org; 425 N Los Angeles St; adult/child $3/2; 10am-3pm Tue-Sun) This small but smart museum is on the site of an early Chinese apothecary and general store, and exhibits probe questions of identity.

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Now encircled by high-rises, there’s public art and summer concerts. Nearby, some turn-of-the-last century architecture remains as it once was. Latino-flavored Broadway has the 1893 Bradbury Building Offline map Google map ( 304 S Broadway; 9am-6pm Mon-Fri, to 5pm Sat & Sun) , whose dazzling galleried atrium featured prominently in Blade Runner . In the early 20th century, Broadway was a glamorous shopping and theater strip, where megastars such as Charlie Chaplin leapt from limos to attend premieres at lavish movie palaces. Some – such as the Orpheum Theater Offline map Google map ( 842 Broadway) – have been restored and once again host screenings and parties.

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Silver Fox BAR (www.silverfoxlongbeach.com; 411 Redondo Ave, Long Beach) Despite its name, all ages frequent this mainstay of gay Long Beach, especially on karaoke nights. It is a short drive from shopping on Retro Row. Drinking Edison BAR Offline map Google map ( www.edisondowntown.com; 108 W 2nd St, off Harlem Alley, Downtown; Wed-Sat) Metropolis meets Blade Runner at this industrial-chic basement boîte, where you’ll be sipping mojitos surrounded by turbines and other machinery back from its days as a boiler room. Don’t worry: it’s all tarted up nicely with cocoa leather couches, three cavernous bars and a dress code. Seven Grand BAR Offline map Google map ( 213-614-0737; 515 W 7th St, Downtown) It’s as if hipsters invaded Mummy and Daddy’s hunt club, amid the tartan-patterned carpeting and deer heads on the walls.

Frommer's California 2007
by Harry Basch , Mark Hiss , Erika Lenkert and Matthew Richard Poole
Published 6 Dec 2006

Capped by a magical five-story skylight, Bradbury’s courtyard combines glazed brick, ornate Mexican tile floors, rich Belgian marble, Art Nouveau grillwork, handsome oak paneling, and lacelike wrought-iron railings. It’s one of the great interior spaces of the 19th century. The glass-topped atrium is often used as a movie and TV set; you’ve probably seen it before in Chinatown and Blade Runner. 304 S. Broadway (at 3rd St.). & 213/626-1893. Mon–Fri 9am–6pm; Sat–Sun 9am–5pm. Completed in September 2002 for $163 million, and built to last 500 years, this ultracontemporary cathedral is one of L.A.’s newest architectural treasures and the world’s third-largest cathedral. It was designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo and features a 20,000-square-foot plaza, more than 6,000 crypts and niches (the largest crypt mausoleum in the U.S.), Mission-style colonnades, biblically inspired gardens, and artworks created by world-acclaimed artists.

…

When you’re strolling through these grand historic halls, it’s easy to imagine the glamorous movie stars who once boarded The City of Los Angeles and The Super Chief to journey back East during the glory days of rail travel; it’s also easy to picture the many joyous reunions between returning soldiers and loved ones following the victorious end to World War II, in the station’s heyday. Movies shot here include Bugsy and Blade Runner. There has always been a restaurant in the station; the latest to occupy this unusually beautiful setting is Traxx. 800 N. Alameda St. (at Cesar E. Chavez Ave.). US Bank Tower (aka Library Tower) Designed by architect I. M. Pei, L.A.’s most distinctive skyscraper (the round one) is the tallest building between Chicago and Singapore.

Lonely Planet London
by Lonely Planet
Published 22 Apr 2012

Meanwhile, well-known British actors such as Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Liam Neeson, Hugh Laurie, Kristin Scott Thomas, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom and Emily Watson spend time working abroad, as do many British directors, such as Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, True Romance), Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma & Louise, Black Hawk Down), Michael Winterbottom (The Claim, The Killer Inside Me) and Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road). London on the Screen London remains one of the most popular places to make films in the world. Newfound converts have included that most die-hard of New Yorkers, Woody Allen, who made Match Point, Scoop and Cassandra ’ s Dream in the capital in recent years before moving on to Barcelona.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

Jommy’s mother is forced to sacrifice her own life so that Jommy may live; with the help of a crafty old homeless woman, the boy takes shelter in an underground society surviving in the nooks and crannies of the urban landscape. Reprinted as a stand-alone novel after World War II, Slan caused a sensation. Its tropes echo through later generations of science fiction: the political machinations in Dune, Star Trek’s half-Betazoid counselor Deanna Troi, the hunt for rogue replicants in Blade Runner, the mutant superpowers of the X-Men. For first-generation fans, Slan had special resonance, because they saw a reflection of their own predicament in this tale of superintelligent, supersensitive, and profoundly misunderstood mutants struggling to survive in a world not built for them. No one carried this notion further than one of the most outrageous fans that ever lived, a renegade space child named Claude Degler.

Jim Henson: The Biography
by Brian Jay Jones
Published 23 Sep 2013

In France, Dark Crystal was awarded the best film at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, while the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films presented Jim with its prestigious Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film—not bad for a year in which it was competing with heavy hitters like E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and Blade Runner. For Jim, the critical acclaim was even more gratifying than the financial success. “[The Dark Crystal] was a huge undertaking—a vision I had,” he wrote, “and one which ultimately has helped to carry our art form to a more sophisticated and technically advanced stage. The most important thing, however, is to love what you’re doing and to go after those visions, no matter where they lead.”

Frommer's California 2009
by Matthew Poole , Harry Basch , Mark Hiss and Erika Lenkert
Published 2 Jan 2009

Capped b y a magical fiv e-story skylight, Bradbury’s cour tyard combines glaz ed brick, ornate M exican tile floors, rich B elgian marble, Art Nouveau grillwork, handsome oak paneling, and lacelike wr ought-iron railings—it’s one of the great interior spaces of the 19th century. The glass-topped atrium is often used as a movie and TV set; you’ve probably seen it before in Chinatown and Blade Runner. 304 S. Broadway (at Third St.). & 213/626-1893. Mon–Fri 9am–6pm; Sat–Sun 9am–5pm. Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels & 213/680-5200. w ww.olacathedral.org. M on–Fri City Hall Built in 1928, the 27-story Los Angeles City Hall was the tallest building in the city for mor e than 30 y ears. The structure’s distinctive ziggurat to wer was designed to resemble the M ausoleum at H alicarnassus, one of the sev en wonders of the ancient world.

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Outside, in a vault on the Ascension Road side, is Andy Gibb. Bette Davis’s sarcophagus is in front of the wall, to the left of the entrance to the Courts. Gene Autry is also buried here, almost within earshot of the museum that bears his name . 556 World War II, in the station’s heyday. Movies shot here include Bugsy, The Way We Were, and Blade Runner. 800 N. Alameda St. (at Cesar E. Chavez Ave.). US Bank Tower (aka Libr ary Tower) Designed by renowned architect I. M. P ei, L.A.’s most distinctiv e skyscraper (it ’s the r ound one) is the tallest building betw een Chicago and Singapore. Built in 1989 at a cost of $450 million, the 76-stor y monolith is both square and rectangular, rising from its Fifth Street base in a series of o verlapping spirals and cubes.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
Published 19 Sep 2011

LOL CREME: Sting was a cocky bugger. On the very first video, he said, “Just keep the camera on the money,” and pointed to himself. And we did. We’re no fools. ANDY SUMMERS, the Police: We made “Synchronicity II” on the outskirts of London. We had to wake up very early to get there, and we wore these kind of Blade Runner outfits. Godley and Creme had built a huge set with three scaffolding towers and gangplanks between them. The towers were way up in the air, probably twenty-five to thirty feet up, and we had to climb up with our instruments. Below, they’d created a sort of wasteland of debris, like cardboard boxes and stuff you’d find at a dump.

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
by Steve Coll
Published 29 Mar 2009

Salem paid him $60,000 just to prepare a presentation, however. “I was doing Salem a favor.”30 Salem was right to choose him; he had an instinct for theatrical luxury. Rather than turning to his San Antonio staff for initial designs, Howard hired Syd Mead, a Hollywood illustrator who had recently attracted attention for his work on the futuristic movie Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. Mead flew with Howard and Salem to Riyadh to present their ideas to King Fahd. The illustrator dazzled them all by sketching ideas while holding his pad upside down, so that Fahd could see his work more clearly. “Your Majesty, I really want to do this plane for you,” Dee Howard told the king.

USA's Best Trips
by Sara Benson
Published 23 May 2010

And then there are gems like the Shakespeare Garden outside the Fine Arts Library. For travelers, it’s a must-see!” Jen Dickman, Morristown, NJ * * * Sansom St is the prime restaurant corridor, and it’s hard to go wrong with any of the eateries here. For more futurama, visit Pod, which is a Steven Starr “theme” restaurant that conjures a neo-Tokyo Blade Runner vibe, with cellophane-red booths, molded white plastic chairs and tables, concrete floor and servers in gun-metal gray. Oh, and the sushi and Japanese meals are excellent, too. If you’re staying the night in Philadelphia, try the adjacent, perfectly situated Inn at Penn, where the stylish wood furnishings evoke a Craftsman feel.

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story
by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Peter Petre
Published 30 Sep 2012

News write-ups in the trade press after the screenings helped us get placement in hundreds of theaters. When Conan opened nationwide on May 14, it became the first blockbuster of what is still talked about as the best movie summer ever. That summer also brought us The Road Warrior, Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The World According to Garp, Poltergeist, An Officer and a Gentleman, Tron, The Thing, and, of course, E.T. Conan the Barbarian held its own among them all. CHAPTER 15 Becoming American BACK IN SANTA MONICA, Maria welcomed me home from Madrid and the Hyborian Age by giving me a little Labrador puppy she had named Conan.

Coastal California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

The masterminds behind California's 1990s neo-noir crime fiction renaissance were James Ellroy (LA Confidential), the late Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) and Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress), whose Easy Rawlins detective novels are set in South Central LA. California technology has long inspired science fiction. Raised in Berkeley, Philip K Dick imagined dystopian futures, including a Los Angeles ruled by artificial intelligence in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It was adapted into the 1982 sci-fi movie classic Blade Runner. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle presents the ultimate what-if scenario: imagine San Francisco circa 1962 if Japan, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had won WWII. Berkeley-born Ursula K Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of Earthsea) brings feminism to the genre of fantasy, imagining parallel realities where heroines confront forces of darkness.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Jobs gifted Macs to the children of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Mick and Bianca Jagger, paying tribute to the counterculture and squeezing Apple into the lineage. The company announced the product launch to the public with an iconic commercial that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. Directed by Ridley Scott (then recently of Alien and Blade Runner fame), the one-minute ad showed a scene right out of George Orwell’s 1984, as rows of worker drones listen to Big Brother on a big screen. In runs a braless blond woman (Anya Major) chased by police, breasts bouncing in an Apple tank top. She wields a giant hammer, which she flings through the propaganda screen.

Central Europe Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Watergate CLUB ( 6128 0394; www.water-gate.de; Falckensteinstrasse 49a; from 11pm Fri & Sat; Schlesisches Tor) Watch the sun rise over the Spree River through the floor-to-ceiling windows of this fantastic lounge. The music is mainly electro, drum’n’bass and hip hop. Weekend CLUB ( www.week-end-berlin.de; Am Alexanderplatz 5; from 11pm Thu-Sat; Alexanderplatz) Tear your eyes from the beautiful people and gaze through the 12th-floor windows, across the Blade Runner landscape of dug-up Alexanderplatz and over Berlin. (Alexanderplatz 5 is the one with the Sanyo logo.) Thursdays are best, while Saturdays see an invasion of suburban weekend warriors. Its rooftop deck is sublime on a summer night. Music & Theatre Staastsoper Unter den Linden OPERA HOUSE ( information 203 540, tickets 2035 4555; www.staatsoper-berlin.de; Unter den Linden 5-7; S-Bahn Unter den Linden) This is the handiest and most prestigious of Berlin’s three opera houses, where unsold seats go on sale cheap an hour before curtains-up.

Greece
by Korina Miller
Published 1 Mar 2010

Greece’s most distinguished composers include Stavros Xarhakos and the late Yannis Xenakis. Mezzo-soprano Agnes Baltsa and acclaimed pianist Dimitris Sgouros are internationally known, while Greece’s answer to Andrea Bocelli is tenor Mario Frangoulis. Composer Vangelis Papathanasiou is best known for film scores, including Oscar-winner Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner and more recently Alexander. Stamatis Spanoudakis wrote the excellent soundtrack to Brides, while Evanthia Remboutsika and Eleni Karaindrou have also written award-winning film scores. * * * The syrtaki dance, immortalised by Anthony Quinn in the final scene of Zorba the Greek, was in fact a dance he improvised, as he had injured his leg the day before the shoot and could not perform the traditional steps and leaps originally planned

Fodor's California 2014
by Fodor's
Published 5 Nov 2013

Designed in 1893 by a novice architect who drew his inspiration from a science-fiction story and a conversation with his dead brother via a Ouija board, the office building was originally the site of turn-of-the-20th-century sweatshops, but now houses a variety of business that try to keep normal working conditions despite the barrage of daily tourist visits and filmmakers. Blade Runner, Chinatown, and Wolf were filmed here. For that reason, visits (and photo-taking) are limited to the lobby and the first-floor landing. The building is open daily 9–5 for a peek, as long as you don’t wander beyond visitor-approved areas. | 304 S. Broadway, southeast corner Broadway and 3rd St., Downtown | 90013 | 213/626–1893.

Shantaram: A Novel
by Gregory David Roberts
Published 12 Oct 2004

As I followed them along the corridors of the Palace, I grew more sullen and resentful with every step. Rajan led us to a room at the very end of a corridor. The door was open. The room was decorated with large movie posters—Lauren Bacall in a still from To Have And Have Not, Pier Angeli from Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Sean Young from Blade Runner. A young and very beautiful woman sat on the large bed in the centre of the room. Her blonde hair was long and thick, ending in spirals of lush curls. Her sky-blue eyes were large and set unusually wide apart. Her skin was flawless pink, her lips painted a deep red. A suitcase and a cosmetic case were snapped shut and resting on the floor at her golden-slippered feet.

Germany Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Just as the coal was transported on conveyor belts, a long escalator whisks you up to the foyer from where you descend into the dark bowels of the building. With its raw stone walls, steep steel stairs, shiny aluminium ducts and industrial machinery, the space itself has all the drama and mystique of a movie set (Blade Runner comes to mind). Don’t miss the section showing the poor conditions of the workers and how an effort to strike for better conditions in the 1920s was brutally crushed. It has echoes today. Panorama VIEWPOINT (Coal-Washing Plant; adult/child €2/free; 10am-8pm Apr-Sep, 10am-6pm Oct-Mar) Feel like a coal miner as you climb dozens of steps up from the Ruhr Museum to the summit of the coal-washing building, where a large viewing platform lets you ponder the vast scope of Zollverein, with the Ruhrgebiet as a backdrop.

Germany
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 17 Oct 2010

Just as the coal was transported on conveyor belts, a long escalator whisks you up to the foyer from where you descend into the dark bowels of the building. With its raw stone walls, steep steel stairs, shiny aluminium ducts and industrial machinery, the space itself has all the drama and mystique of a movie set (Blade Runner comes to mind). Another highlight is the Red Dot Design Museum ( 301 0425; adult/concession/family €5/3/15, under 12yr free; 11am-6pm Tue-Thu, 11am-8pm Fri-Sun) in the stoker’s hall, creatively adapted by Lord Norman Foster. In a perfect marriage of space and function, this four-storey maze showcases the best in contemporary design right amidst the original fixtures: bathtubs balancing on grated walkways, bike helmets dangling from snakelike heating ducts, and beds perching atop a large oven.