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Comparison Of Blade Runner And The Ghost In The Shell

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What if technology became so advanced, that people cannot distinguish between artificial intelligence and humans, not just in looks, but in personalities? These are the worlds created in both Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner and Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga The Ghost in the Shell. Both stories involve self-aware robots that are assimilated into theses culture. In Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard works as a blade runner, a hunter who captures rogue replicants, to keep the society safe from a robot takeover. Major Kusanagi, from The Ghost in the Shell, works in the cities section 9 police task force. Throughout the book, she tries to take down the Puppeteer, the antagonist who steals the ghosts of humans by hacking into their …show more content…

In The Ghost in the Shell, along with the robots produced, humans are transformed into cyborgs. When creating a cyborg, the narrator notes that the cyborg is “over ninety percent machine… at first glance it is very difficult to tell the difference between a cyborg and a robot” (Shirow 101.2). The cyborgs are mostly machine, but still have a human brain and spinal cord, which distinguishes them from a robot. The narrator notes the difficulty in telling the difference between a cyborg and a robot, which blurs the line between humanity and artificial intelligence. Since cyborgs are part human and part machine, this shows how machines are becoming more like humans, and visa-versa, since this society can consider a “robot” a human as long as he or she has the spinal cord and brain of a human. The line between robot and humans runs very thin, even blurred. Similarly, in Blade Runner replicants, or robots, are impossible to distinguish, unless they take an eye test. This test is shown in the first scene of the movie. During the test, a blade runner asks replicant Leon a series of questions and the blade runner monitors his pupils while Leon is answering (Scott 3). The blade runner cannot tell if Leon is a replicant until after the test because of how closely Leon resembles a human. This further shows how the fading line between artificial intelligence and humanity. (How they look so much like

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