Boston University Blade Runner Discussion

For this assignment you are going to choose and watch a movie that is relevant to the topic of ethics and technology.After watching the movie come here and as your first post give a brief synopsis about the movie, why it’s relevant to you
as a computing professional, what universal issues are presented and what examples of ethical and unethical behavior
you see in that movie. The film doesn’t necessarily has to be about computers, for example in Jurassic Park we see
universal ethical issues such as building on top of what others have done, science for the sake of science, corporate
espionage, the alteration of nature through the use of technology, etc.
For your second participation you will engage with your group and have a uniform discussion on the common topics
across the movies you have watched.
If you need some ideas on movies to watch here’s a list to get you started:
Jurassic Park
Ready Player One
Free Guy
The Net (1995)
Matrix Trilogy
Her (2013)
Ex Machina (available for free on Kanopy)
Blade Runner
As always, at least two participations must follow the general guidelines:
•
The participation is engaging and inviting to continue a conversation
•
The participation shows the student’s effort in reading and understanding the material
•
The participation references external information in a clear and concise manner
•
The participation continues a line of thought from other participations
Reply two people:
I watched the Matrix for this assignment. In a post-apocalyptic world, Neo and other members of a resistance fight
against AI machine overlords that are farming and harvesting humans for bioelectricity. The fights aren’t physical, but
rather take place in a virtual reality called the Matrix, where all of humanity lives in a place built to look like modern
society.
When Neo is brought to the real world from the Matrix, Morpheus exposition-dumps on him, and mentions that after the
creation of AI, human civilization soon went to war with the machines, and lost. He also mentioned they “burned the
sky”. In the few shots where the real world can be seen, it’s always dark, so I assume either mankind tried to nuke the
machines, or nuked the sun. (Whichever is more interesting, of course.) It’s basically an ethical violation to detonate a
nuke, as if we needed a repeat of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some people aren’t even comfortable with the idea of
governments having nuclear warheads at all, even the potential of nuclear war being too risky. Whatever happened in
the movie, the fact it was enough to black out the sky? Probably an ethical violation.
Later in the movie, Agent Smith likens humankind to a virus, noting how they spread into an area, take all the natural
resources, then move on to the next area. It’s not an ethical violation, but certainly a universal issue, though. I don’t
have anything to say about this, whether disagreement or proposing a solution. He’s not wrong, and I don’t know any
realistic solutions.
Also, this might be meta, but making out AI to be creepy Lovecraftian entities that keep humans in giant red farms
probably isn’t helping the general public view that AI is evil, all programmers are hackers, etc. That honestly might be
the biggest connection the Matrix has to my potential career. (My parents still tell me to back up my files before
hackathons.)
For this assignment I watched Ready Player One (I also have the book for extra references).
Ready Player One is about a dystopian future in which virtual reality is the escape from the problems humans have
created in this world (climate change, overpopulation, poverty, etc). In the book, it gets bad enough that kids are going
to school in OASIS. After the death of one of its creators (James Halliday), a huge competition over his belongings
breaks out. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the protagonist wins and chooses to close the OASIS once or twice
a week to allow people a break from this false world they lived in to focus on issues in the real world.
There are many issues in the world of Ready Player One. The world had become consumed by virtual reality and real
life money has been applied. In the movie, it plays it out as a joke when an Asian man puts his whole life’s earnings into
the game, just to lose it and ultimately try to jump out a window to end his life. This can be aligned with real life with
cryptocurrency, where some people have lost their loved ones, their house, etc due to a crypto crash. We need to make
sure there is a healthy divide between people’s digital life and their real life. There should be blocks in place where
people can’t simply spend their whole life’s earnings on a game. Not even just for crypto, but for video games as well. In
China, a father is $20,000 in debt due to his teenage daughter spending money on microtransactions from the popular
gacha game Genshin Impact.
Another issue are the punishments created to players in debt. It is not fully explained how it works in the movie, but in
the book it is when people pull loans from IOI and fail to repay them in game, so they are forced into servitude until they
essentially pay it off (but it is rigged by interest, so rarely does anyone pay it off). They live in cruel conditions (living in
a box) with short breaks. The issue comes from the company responsible for OASIS to allow all of these bot accounts
to spawn from IOI to be used as punishment for people in debt. I recognize this is also an issue for the government, but
that doesn’t mean that tech companies shouldn’t step in to prevent as much suffering as they can. Bot accounts needs
to be taken care of. Many social media platforms already have stops for this, but even then they are prevalent.
Finally, I think the main issue is how the government of Ready Player One rolled over and allowed OASIS to financially
and socially control the world. A company shouldn’t have monopoly like this. So, while it is not solely an issue of the tech
company, there needs to be an ethical discussion of how this tech company gained a monopoly over the world like this.