Episode 61: Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049 (Guest: Frank Pasquale)

Episode 61: Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049 (Guest: Frank Pasquale)

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Description

Blade Runner (1982) (dir. Ridley Scott) and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (dir. Denis Villeneuve), two films that imagine a world where the line between human and machine, creation and creator, has all but vanished. Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic depicted a rain-soaked dystopia where “replicants”—bio-engineered beings—fight for recognition, identity, and life itself. Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 sequel deepens that vision. Law operates in the shadows across both films: as surveillance, classification, and control. The “blade runners” themselves enforce a form of administrative violence that exposes the limits of legal personhood. What does it mean to have rights without recognition, or to be alive without legal existence? And conversely, what are the implications of recognizing rights and legal personhood in robots? In this episode, we’ll examine these and other themes around artificial intelligence, migration, colonization, and bioethics as well as the way films themselves can contribute to and shape public perceptions about these issues.

Guest: Frank Pasquale

Frank Pasquale is Professor of Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. His books include The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015) and New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press, 2020). He has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data (Springer-Verlag, 2017). Professor Pasquale is one of the most cited scholars in the U.S. He has also advised business and federal and state government leaders in the healthcare, Internet, and finance sectors, and has served on the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (2022-2024).

Timestamps:

0:00     Introduction

2:45      Emotion and memory in robots

8:08      Slave labor and robot rebellion

9:54      Generative AI and other changes since the first Blade Runner 

15:16      Robots giving birth

20:19     Robot rights

24:17      A new category of companion

32:56    Filmic depictions of AI

38:01     “Time to Die”

43:21     The political economy of AI development

47:22     A dystopian vision of data and surveillance

52:18     A positive post-human future?

57:58     Concepts of immortality

Further Reading:

Almog, Shulamit, “When a Robot Can Love – Blade Runner as a Cautionary Tale on Law and Technology,” in Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice (Jan. 1, 2013)

Birhane, Abeba, van Dijk Jelle, and Pasquale, Frank, “Debunking Robot Rights Metaphysically, Ethically, and Legally,” 29(4) First Monday (2024)

Darling, Kate, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots (2021)

Dick, Philip K., Do Androids Dream of Sheep (1968)

Lewis, C.S., Abolition of Man (1943)

Oliver, Kendra H., Higgs, Oliver S., and Clayton, J., “The End of Genetic Privacy in the Blade Runner Canon,” 14 (1/2) Journal of Literature and Science 108 (Dec. 2022)

Pasquale, Frank, “Cultural Foundations for Conserving Human Capacities Amidst Generative Artificial Intelligence: Toward a Philosophico-Literary Critique of Simulation,” in Being Human (B. Roessler & V. Steeves, eds, 2024)

Publication Date

7-14-2026

Disciplines

Law

Episode 61: Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049 (Guest: Frank Pasquale)

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