IMAGE: Pris from Blade Runner — Publicdomainvectors.org

Who said we’re not living in a Blade Runner world?

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
3 min readJan 6, 2020

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As the year ends in which the scenario imagined by Philip K. Dick in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, later immortalized on celluloid as Blade Runner, it’s clear that those who dismissed its prophecies because the skies are not filled with flying cars are missing the point.

Facebook and Twitter have now identified and closed a network of pro-Trump profiles reaching 55-million-strong Americans, created using fake photographs generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate fake US citizens, who seemingly shared news and constantly participated in political discussions. This use of unique images represented a sophisticated evolution for disinformation networks: the most common way of recognizing a fake profile is via an image search to show the photo was taken from another site.

In reality, the parallels with Philip K. Dick’s dystopia are clear: increasingly perfect robots indiscernible from humans, to the extent that the authorities have to resort to complex tests so as to identify them. Fraud and disinformation is now ubiquitous in electoral campaigns, which are progressively more sophisticated as they use algorithms to create photographs of non-existent people, managed by campaign offices to raise the profile of candidates. What started out as the handiwork of Russian intelligence in the 2016 US presidential…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)