Now That It's 2019, Here's an Official Welcome to Our Blade Runner Future

Since I'm writing this a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, here's an official New World Notes welcome to 2019, the year in which Blade Runner takes place. (See the epic opening scene after the break.) The landmark film has been, for nearly four decades, incredibly influential on the look and style in virtual worlds and games -- and more even broadly, on how we perceive what "the future" is supposed to be. Which also means it's a great frame of reference for how we perceive technological trends and how they'll influence life over the next few decades. For instance, here's what downtown Los Angeles actually looks like now:

When Blade Runner was made in the 1980s, it actually seemed more likely that Los Angeles would become a polluted, squalid hellscape, than what it has since become: A vibrant, liveable, global metropolis that's the greatest city on the planet. (In my somewhat biased opinion.) When we think about the future, we tend to exaggerate existing problems while minimizing our ability to change them.

Then again, the movie did get some key things right: 

As suggested, it did come to pass that we're now living in a time when it's become increasingly difficult to tell virtual humans from real ones (take this quiz if you don't believe me) and high tech billionaires shape our lives with little oversight. (As others have pointed out, LA-based Elon Musk could be our real life Eldon Tyrell, though at least Musk seems a bit more concerned about AIs getting out of control.) Those aspects of the future also seemed likely back in the 1980s. Ironically, Blade Runner inspired countless tech company founders, so you could say the movie helped make those dystopian aspects possible.

Hat tip: /LosAngeles

Comments

[JohnC]

Yay, someone else realizes that 2019 is the year of the original Blade Runner.
So I got my tribute in early. Check out 2019-XS second life on flickr or pop over to SLurl: maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Ravine/187775/265602/31

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I doubt you were every actually in Los Angeles otherwise you would have clearly seen the blocks of homeless encampments downtown. Maybe the VR headset you wear conveniently blocks that out?

smh

[JohnC]

Well its good news for the homeless in the original blade Runner story, because there is plenty of room for everyone as the vast majority of people have gone to the off world colonies and left the cities comparatively empty. Hence no blocks of homeless people. Dystopia is not all bad it seems :)