Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy: This Breaks the World

Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 sequel to the 1982 movie Blade Runner, about a world in which some human-looking replicants have become dangerous, so that other human-looking replicants, as well as humans, have the job of hunting down the dangerous models and retiring (destroying) them. Both films have been widely hailed as among the greatest science-fiction movies of all time, and Ridley Scott, director of the original Blade Runner, has announced that there will be a third movie.

Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy is a collection of entertaining articles on both Blade Runner movies (and on the spin-off short films and novels) by twenty philosophers representing diverse backgrounds and philosophical perspectives. Among the issues addressed in the book:

What does Blade Runner 2049 tell us about the interactions of state power and corporate power?
Can machines ever become truly conscious, or will they always lack some essential human qualities?
The most popular theory of personhood says that a person is defined by their memories, so what happens when memories can be manufactured and inserted at will?
Do AI-endowed human-looking replicants have civil and political rights, or can they be destroyed whenever real humans decide they are inconvenient?
What are the social and psychological implications of human-AI sexual relations?