Blade Runner was never about predicting the future. It was what could become if technology went in certain ways. Japan did not end up ruling the west either.
Blade Runner isn't about the technology per se. It's about our reactions to the technology. If we create a completely autonomous artificial life, is it "a person"? Does it deserve personhood?
The source book is a little better about the question. The major difference between Replicants and people is that people have empathy and Replicants don't. In the book there's a device that allows people to essentially get into this weird empathy group mind thing. It's been a hot minute since I read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" so forgive the details.
And that's what the Voight-Kampf device measures. That's what the questions are designed to test. It's why the first Replicant flips out on the turtle question. He can't process the need to flip over the turtle. He can't empathise with the turtle.
But he's kind of still a child. Which is a little understandable, because Replicants have a 3-year lifespan. They are babies. Toddlers. He flips out because he's throwing a tantrum. Roy Batty and Pris are closer to the end of their life, they've developed empathy, as any person would. That's what gets Deckard. He realizes Replicants are fully people and what we do to them is wrong. Batty was never the bad guy.
But that's all tangential. Blade Runner is set 37 years in the future. Which is now 3 years in the past. It was trying to guess when the relevant technology will be available. I think that's a better way of thinking about it. Science Fiction isn't trying to predict what will be available in X years, it's trying to predict in how many years X will be available.
Definitely this. Bladerunner is all about being a future Noir set in Los Angeles where it is perpetually night and often raining. Surely they knew when filming it or it being written that LA is extremely sunny and never rains.
Picking nits while skipping how we don't have off-world colonies or replicants?
In that case, the comic got things wrong too.
You'll be hard pressed to find people wearing those clothes these days, especially the nurse's headgear. Canes and briefcases are also rare, though I suspect that those rare few wearing a bowler hat might still use them.
My understanding is in the blade runner universe the off world colonies aren't somewhere you'd want to live & the replicants are banned on earth. In other words, two things to be avoided.
So we could easily advance past those points without touching them entirely.
I have always used a bell ringtone, I like it because I find it less-invasive then all the other abstract modern ringtones that only give me alarm clock PTSS.
Unfortunately, Samsung removed the classing bell ringtone in their latest models :(
Star Wars did a horrible job at documenting the past, too! They invented laser beams and all the hokey religious dudes thought energy swords were better?
It's like how hacking or computer UIs are depicted in 80s/90s movies. When the general public doesn't have a good understanding of a technology or the technology doesn't have a good foothold in peoples' lives, you can make these crazy fantastical representations of what (the future of) these technologies might be.
I'm sure some people had the imagination when they first saw radios and how they were removing wires from some devices to think about what this meant for any device with wires.
