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What We Get Wrong About Technology (timharford.com)
Tim Harford, a columnist for the Financial Times, uses the example of Rachael and Rick Deckard from Blade Runner to explain how we humans, when asked about how new inventions might shape the future, often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. Also spoiler of the Blade Runner plot is ahead. He writes: So sophisticated is Rachael that she is impossible to distinguish from a human without specialised equipment; she even believes herself to be human. Los Angeles police detective Rick Deckard knows otherwise; in Rachael, Deckard is faced with an artificial intelligence so beguiling, he finds himself falling in love. Yet when he wants to invite Rachael out for a drink, what does he do? He calls her up from a payphone. There is something revealing about the contrast between the two technologies -- the biotech miracle that is Rachael, and the graffiti-scrawled videophone that Deckard uses to talk to her. It's not simply that Blade Runner fumbled its futurism by failing to anticipate the smartphone. That's a forgivable slip, and Blade Runner is hardly the only film to make it. It's that, when asked to think about how new inventions might shape the future, our imaginations tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. We readily imagine cracking the secrets of artificial life, and downloading and uploading a human mind. Yet when asked to picture how everyday life might look in a society sophisticated enough to build such biological androids, our imaginations falter. Blade Runner audiences found it perfectly plausible that LA would look much the same, beyond the acquisition of some hovercars and a touch of noir.
The crux of the matter is that the payphone isn't the important part of the story. Rachel's unnatural nature is. While the payphone is becoming less common they're not entirely gone either.
Also, one can imagine a scenario where a police detective knows how the technology works, and actually makes a point of avoiding technology that's personally tied to him where actions he takes could arguably be used to demonstrate that he's compromised in some fashion. If you will, he uses the payphone because it's not his phone, so it's harder for a cursory investigation to identify that he made that call in the first place. Admittedly this would be something of a retcon since I doubt that it was even a consideration when the film was made. On the other hand we don't have flying cars, a postapocalyptic landscape, or extraterrestrial colonies either.
Enjoy the story, don't focus on the inane details, they're not important in this case.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Mr Harford, like myself, is British. Britain is an old country, and we live in cities built in some cases several hundred years ago - in same cases with the same buildings still there. Not unique to Britain obviously, am simply using this as an example he should be familiar with.
We still use roads built with gauges governed by ancient carriages. London streets still wend and wind because many were simply not designed for motorised traffic, yet we still use them.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination to consider that cities a hundred years from now will be built on the recognisable and still in use bits that we see today.
Blade Runner is artistically styled specifically to be a false future that blends 1940s noir and high tech, which means you end up with a lot of paradoxical technology elements.
If it was meant to be a coherent high-tech universe, it wouldn't be able to pull off the noir styling it's famous for.
The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future. I wonder how his analysis would hold up with Star Trek.
The whole idea that SF predicts the future is just marketing speak for SF books and movies. It succeeds occasionally, but so does religious prophecy: make enough predictions, and you score some hits, but at the cost of many more misses.
As far as Blade Runner (and most SF) goes, the writers seldom sit down to prognosticate. Most of them think of an interesting premise and see where it goes.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants and Antz had the right number of legs on its impossible talking anthromorphic ants. But it wasn't important to telling the story, and we just did not care.
I've seen authors get plenty of stuff wrong because they "don't care" and clearly feel it's not important. Great way of telling the reader you don't respect their time and breaking suspension of disbelief. The thing is many people try to excuse it with "oh it's fiction/cartoon world/whatever" so anything goes. Unfortunately, one can't logic away breaking the suspension of disbelief.
SJW n. One who posts facts.