Detroit: Become Human and Bladerunner

    Time for the triweekly “hero’s journey in entertainment” spot! We spoke in class Thursday about spirit and Bladerunner, and I wanted to connect the concept of superhumanity to another work. Detroit: Become Human, is decidedly less dystopian than Bladerunner, but it shares the same focus on presence, connection, and comments in very similar ways on what it means to be human. The 12 hour (12!) saga covers three separate heroes, each with their own personal goals, but ultimately highlights their intertwining to comment on whether the screens we filter through to view memories and derive meaning from life make us more or less people. On the one hand, being present—in a flow state—is an amazing experience. On the other hand, its lack of emphasis on meaning is, in some ways, distinctly animal.

Detroit posits another extreme. Does primarily, or exclusively, being able to interpret through a lens of data reduce one’s humanity? Androids in David Cage’s universe take no human DNA. They emulate, rather than simulate, us. Everything they do is calculated, and calculated precisely. At what point, despite that, do they become a person? Is it even possible?

If Bladerunner gives us a lower bound—we must experience emotion—Detroit, I believe, gives the upper; the proof of Androids’ humanity in Cage’s work is their ability to derive meaning.

Despite the very separate proofs of humanity between the two works, both are incredibly satisfying. I see that as a result of defining two simultaneously invaluable traits. And yet they cannot be experienced simultaneously; their mutual exclusiveness instead indicates that successfully human humans oscillate from one state to another to get the most of life.