Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” released in June 1982, is set in a 2019 Los Angeles where the Tyrell Corporation manufactures Nexus-6 “replicants” - bioengineered beings described in the film as superior in strength and agility to, and at least the equal in intelligence of, the humans who make them. The film is based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and was selected for the United States National Film Registry in 1993.
Because replicants are physically indistinguishable from people, the only way to identify one is the Voight-Kampff test: an examiner asks a long series of emotionally loaded questions while a device monitors involuntary responses such as pupil movement, looking for the absence of genuine human empathy. The test is essentially a Turing test inverted - instead of asking whether a machine can pass as human in conversation, it probes for the subtle emotional tells the machine cannot fake.
The film’s lasting cultural contribution is the word “replicant” itself and the unsettling premise that an artificial being might be more human than its makers, raising the question of what moral status such beings deserve.
Why business readers should care: Blade Runner popularized the idea that the hard problem is not building a capable artificial agent but telling it apart from a person - a question now surfacing in debates over disclosure rules for AI-generated text, voices, and avatars.