I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the villain played by Rutger Hauer reminisces at the end of the film Blade Runner after hauling Harrison Ford’s character on to a roof top and sparing his life. “People” is the operative word since Roy Batty is not a person but an android who escapes to earth from a space colony and takes revenge on the Tyrell Corporation, his creator.
That is what I call a killer robot — a being that can hold an intelligent conversation with you before wiping you out. It was science fiction in 1982, when Blade Runner, based on Philip K Dick’s dystopian fantasy novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? came out. It is now faintly plausible — sufficiently for artificial intelligence researchers to warn this week of the dangers of an autonomous arms race.
The killer machines feared by those such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, are crude terminators by comparison with the Nexus replicants in Blade Runner. No one would fall in love with an armed quadcopter that blows up enemy soldiers, as the hero of Blade Runner does with Rachael, the female android who does not realise that she is a replicant.