A stunning, dark and sobering vision of where artificial intelligence and maniacal technocratic elite might take us. This is a hollow and soulless future world in which technology serves to help the people trapped in it escape the horrifying reality made possible by technology.
This is a place beyond salvation where cyborg robots and holographic AI fall in love with each other.
The film is fanciful, but the idea of replicants becoming "more human than human" is grounded in real science.
It begs a big question, "Will AI save, destroy or replace humanity?"
This is the existential question we face, and futurists are divided. Elon Musk and Steven Hawking see the threat of Artificial Intelligence as the greatest we have ever faced.
Technology has obviously lifted humanity from the dark and enables us to live lives of unprecedented comfort and ease.
Technology could also deliver us the literal end of our species.
Stephen Hawking famously worries that advanced AI will take over the world and end the human race. If robots become smarter than humans, his logic goes, the machines would be able to create unimaginable weapons and manipulate human leaders with ease. “It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate,” he told the BBC in 2014. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at SETI believes that AI will succeed humans as the most intelligent entities on the planet. “The first generation [of AI] is just going to do what you tell them; however, by the third generation, then they will have their own agenda,”
They will become so intellectually superior to us that humans trying to understand what they are thinking would be like ants trying to comprehend Shakespeare.
As Arthur C Clark suggested with his monolith in 2001, if we find alien life it may have become transcended or overtaken by inorganic intelligence.
Malicious software using artificial intelligence could lead to a new digital arms race in which A.I.-driven defenses battled A.I.-driven offenses while humans watched from the sidelines.
Technology is already eroding privacy via electronic data mining, tracking systems, biometric recognition and surveillance programs that are far beyond Orwell's imaginings.
Technological "advances" will no doubt render privacy an artifact of the past in the not-too-distant future. There can be no freedom where there is no privacy. When a connection between our brains and tech is made, even the realms of our minds will not be our own.
Some futurists see the merger of man and machine giving us godlike powers.
Will we become more than human, less than human or replaced by a superior new species?