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Comment by rs186 | Hacker News Reader

> Emotional nuance is not a characteristic I would know how to test!

Well, that's easy, we knew that decades ago.

    It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet.

    You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar.

    You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.

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Something I hadn’t thought about before with the V-K test: in the setting of the film animals are just about extinct. The only animal life we see are engineered like the replicants.

I had always thought of the test as about empathy for the animals, but hadn’t really clocked that in the world of the film the scenarios are all major transgressions.

The calfskin wallet isn’t just in poor taste, it’s rare & obscene.

Totally off topic, but thanks for the thought.

I had never picked up on the nuance of the V-K test. Somehow I missed the salience of the animal extinction. The questions all seemed strange to me, but in a very Dickian sort of way. This discussion was very enlightening.

Just read Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep, I’d highly recommend it. It’s quite different than Blade Runner. It leans much heavier into these kinds of themes, there’s a whole sort of religion about caring for animals and cultivating human empathy.

The book is worth reading and it's interesting how much they changed for the movie. I like having read the book, it makes certain sequences a little more impactful.

"Do your like our owl?"

"It's artificial?"

"Of course it is."

It never hit me until I got older how clever Tyrell is - he knows he's close to perfection with Rachel and the V-K test is his chance.

"I want to see it work. I want to see a negative before I provide it with a positive."

Afterwards when he's debriefing with Deckard on how hard he had to work to figure out that Rachel's a replicant, he's working really hard to contain his excitement.

Ran these through gpt5 and 4o. 4o > gpt5

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