The movie Blade Runner describes a 2020 culture where there seems to be two dominating manufacturing powers. The opening scence to the metropolis world of Earth, shows advertisements for Coke-Cola, and other American, and Asain, brands. The economy is capitalistic, but it seems there are two classes of econimic standing, those who have and those who don't. Earth is now a vast City-world, and all of nature is non-existant. The cybernetic world now sell perfectly manufactured replicas of animals, and humans. The culture seems to be pleasure centered, meaning that the ideal life the status quo, is a life of leisure. Most of Earth's population has moved off-world, those left behind, are street urchins, criminals, scientists working for the manufacturers, and the cops. Now on Earth the manufacturers have become very adept at making replicas of humans, and this leads to a new race of replicants, those who think like humans, and look like humans. A moral message raised was that it was wrong to enslave the replicants and us them for forced labor, and I agree with this message. But to make it moral to enslave the replicants, I think, all you have to do is change the thought process part of them. If you changed their minds, thought process, from being self-aware, and able to problem solve, and back to single processes like cut this metal sheet, cut this metal sheet, or build the whole car, build the whole car. Once you change the thought process the robotic, man-made, replicants regardles of how human they look could still be used for forced labor, because they would be machines. I believe this ties in with the themes of Order and Chaos, and the Ideas of ourselves among others, because without being self aware, we cannot see how our actions affect others. The replicants see how they are percieved within this culture and try thier best to be human, and live their lives... This leads to chaos; the machines now experience no order, they feel something that doesn't correspond with the logic of their machine minds. The replicants to try to extend their lives by going rogue. The replicants are very strong and powerful, but its the human's ability to think and problem solve that over comes even the brightest and most dangerous replicant and end the movie.
Image accessed: March 20, 2010
Image accessed from: http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/movie/bladerunner/blade_runner_11.jpg
Yes, you stated "without being self aware, we cannot see how our actions affect others" and perhaps this was the problem, they built the robots "more human than human" so they were almost hyper-aware.
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