Los Angeles in 2019. A gloomy city, where it is constantly raining and furnaces throw fire into the air at regular intervals. The city has become so multicultural that people can barely communicate with each other. The dystopian world that Ridley Scott imagines in Blade Runner in 1982 accompanied by the melancholic synthesizer sounds by Vangelis is anything but inviting. The city’s only bright building, a huge shiny gold pyramid-like structure, belongs to a man named Tyrell. The small man with huge glasses is the inventor and designer of robots that are sent to Mars to make the planet habitable under the harshest conditions. These robots called “replicants” are indistinguishable from humans in their behavior and appearance. Only when one studies their emotional reactions up close, they can be distinguished from humans.

After four of the replicants have illegally left Mars and made their way to Earth, police officer Rick Deckard is asked to find and eliminate them. Deckard is a good replicant hunter, so it doesn’t take him long to eliminate almost all of them. Only one remains until the end—Roy. Of all the replicants, Roy is not only the most intelligent and strongest but also the one who undergoes the greatest development in the course of the film. From a kind of primitive robot who speaks in a choppy voice and feels no empathy for humans he occasionally kills, he goes through stages of development much like the developmental stages of a human being. In the beginning, he is impulsive and taciturn like a child, then aggressive and searching for meaning like an adolescent, who then turns into a Nietzschean Übermensch until at the moment of his death, he becomes compassionate and spiritual.

If one adopts the emergentist perspective,Footnote 1 according to which the next higher level is not determined by the lower level, one cannot rule out the possibility that software-controlled systems will one day have mental states, indeed the capacity for insight. There is no principled argument that only biological and non-physical materiality enables feelings, beliefs, intentions, decisions, etc. Experience with biology teaches us that such transitions are usually fluid, gradual: The newborn child probably has no beliefs and pursues no intentions, but a few months later there can be no doubt about either. The danger in dealing with Artificial Intelligence is to confuse simulation with realization. This often enough leads us to use an inappropriate vocabulary, according to which software systems have “perceptions” and “make decisions.” For example, when the navigation system commands “Turn right,” we attribute an intention to the system, namely, to make us turn right. But as things stand, that is, at the current state of digital technologies, this would be a mystification—even if the film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, USA, 1982) seems to suggest that there is such an emergentist development from an AI that merely simulates human faculties to an AI that realizes these faculties.

Software systems do not feel, think and decide, humans on the contrary do, as they are not determined by mechanical processes. Thanks to their capacity for insight as well as their ability to have feelings, they can determine their actions themselves, and they do this by deciding to act in this way and not in another. Humans have reasons for what they do. Humans as rational beings are able to recognize mathematical and logical truths, they can distinguish good from bad reasons. By engaging participate in theoretical and practical reasoning we influence our mental states, our thinking, feeling, and acting thereby exerting a causal effect on the biological and physical world. If the world were to be understood reductionistically, all higher phenomena from biology to psychology to logic and ethics would be determined by physical laws: Human decisions and beliefs would be causally irrelevant in such a world.Footnote 2

In one of the most beautiful moments in film history, the last dramatic scene of Blade Runner, there is a showdown between Deckard and Roy. Roy, who is seriously hurt and close to dying, is still obsessed by killing Deckard. Like a wild animal, he chases Deckard through a run-down skyscraper, his bare upper body is covered with white paint. Eventually, both reach the roof of the building. When Deckard tries to jump onto another roof, he slips. With the last of his strength, he is able to hold on to an iron bar. He knows that if he lets go, he will fall and die. At that moment, Roy appears above him, half-naked, bleeding, and confident of victory, a Nietzschean Übermensch. Roy looks at Deckard, sees him struggling for his life. The spectator expects him to kick Deckard off the roof but instead of this something else happens. Roy looks in Deckard’s eyes and reaches out his hand to Deckard to help him back onto the roof.

Roy sits down opposite his former enemy. He knows he is about to die. The rain drips down his face. “I’ve seen things,” Roy says, “you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.”

And after a short pause: “Time to die.” Then he lowers his head. He is dead.

At this moment, we see a dove fly from the roof into the sky. The bird—easily read as a symbol for Roy’s soul—makes it clear what Ridley Scott wants to tell the viewer here: replicants can—if they have enough time and enough experiences and memories—become sentient, empathetic, spiritual beings. We should however be careful not to understand this as a realistic prophecy of how Artificial Intelligence will evolve but as a metaphor for the power of transformation of humans who are able to expand their capacities in order to gain moral sentiments like forgiveness and empathy.