From imagined figures to a practical problem

Until the last century, the notes say, the posthuman was mainly a creature of artistic imagination. Science fiction, picturing futures that might be a utopia or a dystopia, opened a new field and made the robot, artificial intelligence, the android and the cyborg into cultural icons. They were technical artifacts, yet close enough to us to be thought of as post-human beings.

Then, the writer argues, leaps in genetic engineering, biotechnology, neuroscience and cognitive science moved the posthuman out of imagination and into real questions. These techniques do not only change the world around us; they take the body and the mind as objects they can work on, and they have the potential to raise what we think of as our inner or natural make-up.

In that sense, the notes claim, we have become the first species on earth able to choose the direction of our own evolution. Engineers and scientists are not alone in asking how this new being remakes the conditions of the human. The essay turns to two films, and to the social issues they bring into view.

Replicants in a ruined 2019, and a test of the eye

Blade Runner is a film of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Its setting is a ruined Los Angeles of 2019, after a nuclear war. That year belongs to the film. Human beings, the notes say, use replicants as slaves in order to leave a contaminated earth and to open other planets. Replicants with a will of their own then rise and slip back to earth to meet their maker, and special police — blade runners — go after them.

The Tyrell slogan, “More human than human,” shows the film’s view of the posthuman: there is no difference in looks. To tell a troublesome replicant from a human being, a blade runner uses the Voight-Kampff machine, which holds the eye and asks questions while watching feeling move in the pupil. Questions in the notes include a dog set on the table, and a tortoise turned over in the desert.

Replicants are born as adults, still unused to emotions that people learn over decades. Tyrell plants memories in them, but those memories are fragmentary, not a continuous line from childhood. A human being who recalls a sad or happy past feels the change naturally; in a replicant, the notes say, there is a crack between memory and feeling. The body is a genetic copy; the intelligence is wholly made. The film, the writer thinks, still allows that a posthuman made from nothing may have life, and even a soul, once each copy has lived its own time.

Iron Man, and the body that keeps being upgraded

Iron Man, by contrast, starts from a human organism and evolves toward the machine. Tony Stark, a gifted head of an arms firm, is badly wounded in the chest and, to escape a guerrilla force, builds an armored suit. Later he completes a high-tech Mark 3 and is remade as Iron Man.

The film joins a familiar superhero plot to a posthuman imagination, and it asks what becomes possible if the physical body can be improved the way software is upgraded, and why such a being would still be called human. Even without the motive of saving the world, the writer says, intelligent machines may one day be fitted to the body to improve ordinary life, and the line between human and machine will blur. Blade Runner’s social question, as the notes frame it, is artificial life, and the relation between consciousness and cognition when we decide what to pursue.

The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student essay on the posthuman, read through Blade Runner and Iron Man.
2. The 2019 of Blade Runner is the film’s ruined Los Angeles after a nuclear war, and stays inside the film.
3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Tyrell slogan, the Voight-Kampff test, and Tony Stark’s Mark 3, as the notes present them.

Last updated: 14 November 2026