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Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

It's just incredible to me that Blade Runner predicted this in literally the very first scene of the movie. The whole thing's about telling humans from robots! Albeit rather more dramatically than the stakes for any of us in front of our laptop I'd imagine

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What was once science fiction is bound to become science fact (or at least proven it can never be done).

Hollywood has gotten hate mail since the 70s for their lack of science research in movies and shows. The big blockbuster hits actually spent money to get the science “plausible”.

Sidney Perkowitz has a book called Hollywood Science [0] that goes into detail into more than 100 movies, worth a read.

[0] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywood-science/978023114280...

The fictitious Voight-Kampff test is based on a real machine based on terrible pseudo-science that was used in the 1960s to allegedly detect homosexuals working in Canadian public service so they could be purged. The line from the movie where Rachel asks if Deckard is trying to determine whether she is a replicant or a lesbian may be an allusion to the fruit machine. One of its features was measuring eye dilation, just as depicted in the movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

The stakes for men subjected to the test were the loss of their livelihoods, public shaming, and ostracism. So... Blade Runner was not just predicting the future, it was describing the world Philip K. Dick lived in when he wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in the late 1960s.

This was an uncomfortable read, I'm quite frankly shocked at the amount of brainpower and other resources that went into attempting to weed out gay men from the Canadian civil service, into the 90s no less! To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

Then I remembered what happened to Turing in the 50s.

> To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

We seem to need an internal enemy to blame for our societies' problems, because it's easier than facing the reality that we all play a part in creating those problems.

Gay people are among the oldest of those targets, going back to at least the times of the Old Testament (i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah).

We've only recently somewhat evolved past that mindset.

If a malicious actor found a gay person in such a job, they could easily extort them with the threat of getting them fired! So obviously you had to fire gay people, lest they get extorted by someone threatening to expose them and thus get them fired.

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