How Bladerunner got it wrong

It's now November 2019, the time that the original Bladerunner movie was set, and this is an example of the watch worn by the lead character, Rick Deckard, as played by Harrison Ford. The film was made in 1982 when the Swiss watch industry was under great pressure from manufacturers of mass produced quartz / digital watches, so perhaps it's not surprising that director Ridley Scott imagined a future where these were the type of watches on everyone's wrists?

Coincidentally watched both the '82 Bladerunner and the '73 Soylent Green with Charlton Heston recently. Was thinking the same thing about how 2019 was seen as such a futuristic date and here we are.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Or
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to buy a new battery.”

Arguably, you can't blame them, as when this LCD watchface came out, it was so friggin' cool looking it was inconceivable that things would revert. Like CDs and Vinyl...which happened at roughly the same time. I remember my folks filling a pickup (maybe 4 times) with vinyl and taking them to the dump to be thrown away ... little did anybody then know that in 2019 vinyl would outsell CD, and even less did anybody then know how crazy expensive vinyl would be today...or what vintage vinyl would be worth. Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin etc etc etc ... all dumped ... Same with watches I guess...

Also, we haven’t migrated to space yet, but hey - sex robots are a thing now, even if none of them look like Darryl Hannah... and we almost have flying cars...

Absolutely one of the most plausible future Sci-fi series. Really pleased Amazon picked up the series from SyFy.

Are you kidding? I have to smuggle watch straps into the house past Mrs K... how on earth would I explain a sex robot??

I’ll keep an eye out for it - just finished watching Altered Carbon, another sci-fi dystopian future series, on Netflix - that was also very good.

Well, one thing you can say about that watch is that it's very effective at serving its purpose... .which would make it highly rated as a "tool".

the thing is it's digital, which means it's too precise a measure of time for humans to bother with. I mean who says "it's 4:51"? That's why analog watches are better. they provide a close enough measure of time that we can understand that it's passing, but not so precise that we have to calculate the exact number to an approximate one. "it's about 10 to 5".

But on topic, I can understand why, from 1982, you might think that the digital watch was the apex of evolution of time telling devices. Seriously. What could you do to improve upon that watch? I mean, other than make it run forever without the need to charge or change batteries (which isn't an optimization on the time telling abilities, more of an optimization on the convenience factor of having time on your wrist.

maybe they got it right and WE'RE wrong... hmmm....

😵‍💫

...edit just to add that the one thing we (someone?) could do to improve upon our conception of time would be to implement a time system that was not tied to the little ball of gas that keeps us warm, or the rotational speed of the insignificant piece of rock we live on... I mean, c'mon, *24* hours in a day? 30-31 days in a month, and one month only 28? "leap year"? WTF? what kind of measures are those?? We need something better if we're going to get off this planet.

I have such a time keeping system, but I didn't want to be the guy that ended (current) time. Cause who knows what that even means?

The sci-fi movie that sets the benchmark about technology predictions for me is "2001 - A Space Odyssey". Made in 1968 and portraying space technology in 2001, it would have seemed a realistic projection of the future given how much had been achieved in the decade of the 1960s and with the 1st moon landing mission planned for the following year. If we humans had carried on developing technology at the same rate thru the 70's, '80's and '90's, it potentially could have come true by 2001 but the will to do so wasn't there.

When I was a kid I thought space tourism would be reasonably commonplace in my lifetime but not any more. Today we still haven't got to where Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke envisaged we'd be nearly 2 decades ago. Passengers travelling in commercial spacecraft to the moon (=Nope), bases on the Moon (=Nope), AI like HAL (=Nope), astronauts going to Jupiter's moons (=Nope), humans in cryogenic suspension (=Nope).