Blade Runner and the pitfalls of predicting future technologies

About a fortnight ago, a friend marked her first visit to Tokyo by upholding a long tradition. After walking through rain-soaked Shinjuku, being loomed over by neon signs and be-steamed by a tradesman’s noodle broth, she dropped the B-bomb.

The whole scene was, she concluded with the delight of Archimedes jumping from his bath, “like something out of Blade Runner”.

I wasn’t going to spoil her fun, but this has very much been the conclusion of all visitors to Tokyo since 1982: the year Blade Runner was released in cinemas and Ridley Scott’s vision of a dark, insidiously Japanised Los Angeles — both fattened and gutted by technology — was indelibly stamped upon our perception of the future.

What made my friend’s B-bomb different from its predecessors was that it was landing in November 2019: the very month in which Blade Runner is set. The calendar has now made a thing of the past out of something that always felt defiantly of the future.

Which raises a few questions for those former visionaries of life in 2019. Where is my anti-gravity car? Where can I buy a ticket to Mars? And where is my android so sophisticated that only Harrison Ford can distinguish it from a human? Also, what lessons are there for those today who claim to see the distant future?

In mid-October, visitors to Japan’s cherished advanced technology trade show, Ceatec, were promised a demonstration of a flying car. Despite once being an unmissable event in the global tech diary, Ceatec’s main take-away in recent years has been a faint sense of disappointment.

In keeping with that, the flying car turned out to be a cumbersome fibreglass drone that couldn’t yet take a passenger and only briefly left the ground.

Elsewhere, a variety of exhibitors showcased the cutting edge of artificially intelligent robots — the well-behind-schedule forebears of the Blade Runner replicants that can kill with weaponised thighs.

One robot was purported to be capable of folding a napkin. Engineers fussed in the background, but to no avail. This was a robot that couldn’t cope with crumpled tableware, let alone the agonising memories of the Tannhäuser Gate and a bloody interplanetary war.

Buildings, too, have reached real-life November 2019 looking nothing like the ones that soared into Blade Runner’s fetid firmament. Around the world, there are currently about 23 buildings of more than 100 storeys, with perhaps another 20 planned for the next few years.

Nothing comes remotely close to the 700-storey headquarters of the fictional Tyrell Corporation, though that is not for want of ambition.

Some years ago, the Japanese construction group Shimizu laid out plans for a structure that would accommodate one million people and rise 2km above Tokyo bay.

The only snag, and the reason the company is now not promising anything before the year 2110, is that the materials needed to build something of this size have not yet been perfected or mass-produced.

Despite the obvious pitfalls of forecasting both the direction that technology will take and its effects on society, Japan treats the guessing game as a matter of state-funded national interest.

This month, the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (Nistep) produced its 11th “foresight” paper — a survey that canvasses thousands of scientists and attempts to crowdsource the likely dates that 700 different technologies will be realised. These range from flying cars (2033) and permanent outposts on Mars (2040) to cracking the secret of dark energy (2043).

Like Ridley Scott and every other purveyor of science fiction, the contributors to the Nistep survey make their predictions with no serious consequence for being wrong. But having actually reached November 2019, it is tempting to have a moment of humility and accept just how bad we are at technology predictions.

While doing so, we might also use the mismatch between real and fictional as a scale on which to gauge the likely success of the bets taken by SoftBank’s $97bn Vision Fund — a staggering wager on an imagined futurescape whose investments are supposedly guided by a 300-year business plan.

Softbank’s far-seeing founder Masayoshi Son may see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; everyone else sees the collapsed valuation of WeWork.

Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo correspondent

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