The Internet, biotechnology, “artificial” intelligence and robotic/prosthetic technologies,

and media simulation (and dissimulation) tied to information, commerce, politics,

and entertainment made the nature of human “identity” and “reality” highly
ambiguous and spatially and temporally diffuse. (Vivian Sobchack 272) ED. David Seed, 2005, Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing: A Companion to Science Fiction
Blade Runner’s genetically manufactured “replicants” are “more human than human,”
valuing existence more than do their exhausted human counterparts. (Vivian Sobchack 272)
conventional
ideas about “the human” have been disrupted in the context of the postmodern, an
era and a condition that regards “man,” that is, the conventional Enlightenment
Subject, to be – in Michel Foucault’s phrase – “an invention of recent date. And one
perhaps nearing its end” (Foucault 1973: 387). Arguably, some of the impact of Foucault’s
observation about the impending “end of man” derives from the way in which
it philosophically “de-naturalizes” everyday understandings about “the human” as a
stable and unchanging category. Cyberpunk’s stories about the implosions of organic
nature and inorganic technology imagine processes of denaturalization in which “the
human” is literally transformed into the posthuman (we might consider this a more
radical version of “defamiliarization,” the “making the familiar strange” that is often
considered to be the essence of SF’s interactions with “the real world”). (Veronica Hollinger 237)

THE MACHINE
“Some people can’t give up hope.” (James 2014: 13.14) …en if they know deep down that it’s hopeless.
(13.17)
If I wasn’t gentle, you’d break. I don’t want to hurt you, Vincent. (36.00)
“You can’t fix someone who is dead.” (38.41)
“What are you really? How do I know that you are alive and not just a clever imitation of life?” (50.24-
29)
How do you know if Thomson is alive? Or your daughter? (50.36) What makes my clever imitation of
life any different from theirs? (50.41)
Thye’re human. They ARE alive. / But how do you know that? You can’t see their thoughts. (50.50)
Apart from their flesh , what makes them any different from me? 50.56
The technologically advanced tribe always wins.1.05.52 Thomson
You’re the future. She’ll need you more than me in her new life. 1.19.36 I trust you 1.19.46 (when he
needs to know that his daughters files are still in the system, she offers to copy them into her brain)

Brian Stableford. Science Fact and Science Fiction: an Encyclopedia. New York, London: Routledge,
2006
A term used in *computer science since the 1970s to
describe the development of programs duplicating
various aspects of intelligent thought. It is routinely
used as a specific noun as well as a collective one. AI is
a subcategory of *cybernetics; its range is difficult to
establish because of problems afflicting the precise
definition and detailed description of *intelligence.
Early advocates of the notion made much of Alan
Turing’s suggestion that a machine might be reckoned
intelligent if it could engage a human in conversation
without the human being able to identify it as a
machine, but the rapid success of computer programmes
specialising in conversational mimicry suggested
that the Turing test was far too easy. The
success of specialist chess-playing programmes similarly
suggested that a complex spectrum of standards
would be required to achieve a proper evaluation of
any candidate AI. (34)