The Problem with the Voight-Kampff Test

Do Replicants Dream of Longer Life Spans?

1982’s Blade Runner may not have been as brimming with existential questions as the book it was based on (Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), but one thing it got right was the Voight-Kampff test. Let’s ignore for the moment the jarring discovery that Milton Bradley evidently released a game based on the Voight-Kampff test (based on the 1982 film). A game in which young children apparently sought to determine whether or not their friends were replicants. Learned that today. Instead, one might explore how effectively the book and the film described (and portrayed) this fictional test in which answers to hypothetical, emoted questions as well as specific bodily reactions (e.g., the infamous pupillary and blush responses) were used to separate humans from their very close, albeit manufactured kin, the replicants.

Upon reading Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? 10 years ago, nothing about the manner in which the Voight-Kampff test was described seemed at odds with the rest of the book. An officer administers the test to a participant who he suspects might be a replicant. A replicant of course is the term used to describe an android designed for labor off of Earth and with a predetermined end date. My opinion of the Voight-Kampff test changed when I revisited the book in 2019. At this time, I was struck by the idea that the Voight-Kampff test’s efficacy hinged on the supposition that replicants would fail in displaying the sort of empathy that a human would feel, all while the humans in the book demonstrate not only a startling brutality but in fact a lack of empathy not only toward one another but toward the replicants which so closely resemble them. I, at least, felt there was some irony there. The irony hadn’t been apparent upon first reading and I wonder whether Dick himself appreciated it. Somehow I think Turing, Dick’s ideological predecessor, would have appreciated this problem.

But the nuances and irony of the book are not lost on Ridley Scott and are evident in his 1982 treatment, which has since become a classic of American science fiction. In Blade Runner, the replicants are perceptibly different from the other human characters - they exhibit a narrower range of emotions or they seem more one-dimensional than one might expect a typical and authentically human being to be - but they contemplate their existence and the futility of their struggle in a way that only a creature with higher order cognition and at least the potential for empathy would. In other words, the replicants may not demonstrate clear empathy, but their sensitivity and awareness imply the capacity to develop empathy.

Ridley Scott’s replicants were more human than Dick’s were, and by making them so human Scott sidestepped a problem with Dick’s narrative: that humans stamped replicants as lacking empathy when the humans themselves generally displayed a lack of empathy. Offing the electric animals of their neighbors and friends out of jealousy. Creating beings that are essentially indistinguishable (at least physically) from humans and then damning them to a life of involuntary servitude off world with an expiration date of a few years. Scott’s narrative, starting with the character of Zhora but reaching a climax with Roy Batty (portrayed ever so well by Rutger Hauer), seems to suggest that the replicants, rather than being non-human, are more akin to human children who might potentially grow to exhibit those accoutrements that we presume distinguish ourselves from other life on Earth, manufactured or otherwise.

Blade Runner and its source text are fertile ground for exploring existential concepts or present-day problems. On the horizon for future discussion: DALL-E and Mercerism…