Blade Runner Official Trailer. Video / Movieclips Classic Trailers
The year is 2019. The world is a polluted mess, technology rules our lives and artificial intelligence is starting to get seriously weird.
This – ironically – was the dystopian vision of the future Ridley Scott gave us in the sci-fi cult classic film Blade Runner more than 30 yearsago.
It was eerily on point for a movie originally inspired by a '60s novel and produced in 1982, several years before the invention of the World Wide Web, of Google, smartphones and climate change as we know it.
Although, luckily for us, we're not yet running around hunting down rogue robots as Rick Deckard, aka Harrison Ford, had to do in the movie.
"Oftentimes science fiction doesn't predict things, but it does inspire new technologies to emerge later on," global futurist Anders Sorman-Nilsson said.
So let's take a look at seven things the film got right – or at least almost right – about the future.
1. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is so advanced in the film, it makes the characters question what it means to be human. Photo / Supplied
OK, so we haven't quite got robot "replicants" running around, which are almost indistinguishable from humans.
But artificial intelligence is well and truly here – think Siri on your phone – and the computing power of our devices is doubling every few years.
Mr Sorman-Nilsson believes it could be just a decade or two before we develop robots that can both beat us at chess and function in society.
"It's on an exponential growth curve," Mr Sorman-Nilsson said.
"I found myself in a position 18 months ago where I had to engage in a panel debate with the robot Sophia at a conference," he said, referring to the humanoid robot that became the first to be granted citizenship in 2017.
2. FLYING CARS
Flying cars are closer than you might think. Photo / Supplied
Flying cars aren't yet a reality, but we're much closer to zipping around like The Jetsons than you might think.
For starters, Melbourne will become one of the three testing grounds for Uber Air next year. The ride-sharing app hopes to be flying you around in electric air taxis by 2023.
And drones are already being widely used for things like agriculture and warfare.
"There are hopes that in Tokyo next year for the Olympics the torch will be flown by a human in an autonomous drone," Mr Sorman-Nilsson said.
"Once the technology is good enough and it's compliant with civil aviation authorities, then I think you'll see (flying car) technology being adopted fairly quickly."
3. HUGE DIGITAL BILLBOARDS
Advertising is everywhere. Photo / Supplied
Digital billboards are everywhere – from China to Times Square, even in your local shopping centre probably.
They were everywhere in the dreary megalopolis that was Los Angeles in Blade Runner, but the technology we have today is far more advanced.
Smart billboards, for example, can change what they advertise based on who's in the area or what the weather is like, according to Mr Sorman-Nilsson.
What was perhaps more interesting in the film were the brands those mega billboards were marketing. While the Coca-Cola Company is still around, the airline Pan American World Airways, or Pan Am, is not.
4. VIDEO CALLS
Did Blade Runner inspire FaceTime? Photo / Supplied
Blade Runner was hilariously so close, yet so far with its depiction of video calls.
In the film, Deckard has to fire up a phone booth to FaceTime his buddy replicant Racheal.
These days while everyone makes video calls, phone booths are as good as dead.
Believe it or not, this was a robot in Blade Runner. Photo / Supplied
The replicants in Blade Runner were designed to live for only four years.
This, much to their displeasure, stopped them from developing complex human emotions and from becoming too advanced.
Their frustration is something longtime iPhone users might be able to sympathise with.
In 2017, Apple admitted it was deliberately slowing down the operation of its older phones "to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down".
The revelation sparked fervent speculation in some corners of the internet that Apple was deliberately slowing down its phones to encourage people to buy the latest model.
It's a strategy called "planned obsolescence" and it's "alive and well" in the tech industry today, according to Mr Sorman-Nilsson.
Deckard used voice command in the film to analyse images on his computer. Photo / Supplied
Talking to computers might have felt very futuristic in the '80s, but not anymore!
Deckard used voice command in the film to analyse images on his computer, but these days we can do much more than that.
"We can order food and our entire shopping lists now via Amazon's Alexa Echo for example," Mr Sorman-Nilsson said.
7. CLIMATE CHANGE
Los Angeles was drizzly and horrible in the film. Photo / Supplied
Finally, to the biggest and most poignant fact Blade Runner got right about the future: our changing climate.
Los Angeles was soaked by near constant rainfall in the film – a grim consequence of humans failing to look after the world.
"(It was) of the time of the Cold War … of industrial pollution across Europe and the real world of the iron curtain where the idea of a nuclear war wasn't actually that far-fetched," Mr Sorman-Nilsson said.
"It was a call to action to take environmental concerns seriously."
But it seems we missed the message.
Just this week, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern celebrated her country no longer debating whether climate change was real, and she was looking towards what it could do about it.
