ReFocus: The Films of Denis Villeneuve Jeri English and Marie Pascal (Eds) Edinburgh University Press - 1 - Title: MERE DATA MAKES A MAN: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES IN BLADE RUNNER 2049 Chapter: “Mere data makes a man. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you. All from four symbols. I am only two: 1 and 0.” Joi (Blade Runner 2049) “Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts become technologically reproducible.” Friedrich Kittler (1999:11) Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve 2017) uses the manner with which near-future technology recreates or feigns consciousness to present a wider discourse around notions of identity, memory, and the formulation of the self and subjectivity. The franchise, which began in 1982 with Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), has grown to include three short film stories commissioned by Villeneuve to dramatise moments that take place after the 2019 setting of the original film and before the events of his feature-length sequel, occuring thirty years later. These include the anime Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (Shinichiro Wantabe 2017) and two live-action in-world shorts 2036: Nexus Dawn (Luke Scott 2017) and 2048: Nowhere to Run (Luke Scott 2017). Each share similar values, with the short films detailing events significant in Villeneuve’s sequel and, to one extent or another, exploring the impact of technological change on society and the anchoring of individual and collective identities to digital or organic memories. This chapter considers how Villeneuve’s film represents machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) as a biocapitalist discourse that considers the philosophical and ethical impacts of real-world applications of technology and the expression of biopolitical power. The Blade Runner cinematic universe is orientated around three themes; (1) the development, use, and exploitation of technology, (2) the ethics related to the deployment of this technology by members of the public and corporations, and (3) an exploration of the nature of what constitutes consciousness specifically related to artificial intelligence and bioengineered technology. In Blade Runner 2049, these are made manifest through two key characters. K is the ninth generation of Nexus ‘replicants’, organic lifeforms biologically engineered by the Wallace Corporation. K is an indentured servant of the Los Angeles Police Department tasked to track and ‘retire’ - a euphemism used in the franchise for the killing of earlier models of replicant. Joi, K’s holographic ‘companion’, initially occupies K’s home through a projection system and latterly explores the world through a portable ‘emanator’ which K obtains, freeing Joi from the boundaries of his apartment. Joi originates as an off- the-shelf artificial intelligence, though evolves from this starting entity as experiences are shared and can build upon its knowledge of their companion. This evolved state is stored either in the cloud or is shown later in the narrative to be downloaded to a local device, such as the emanator. The place of both characters in the world is determined solely through their core function – K as a law enforcement officer tasked to track down replicants and Joi’s role of companion. Both find themselves denigrated by others in society, K is referred to as a ‘skinjob’ or ‘skinner’ by fellow