Alone in Sci-Fi: The Impossibility of Oneness in Blade Runner 2049 and Empire of the Senseless
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As McLuhan prophesized, the new mediums of electric and communicative technology are no longer separate from the human body and have become rather an extension of body and a reflection of contemporary overloaded minds. Anxieties about technological autonomy steadily increase as artificial intelligences strive towards singularity as the boundaries between human and nonhuman become increasingly indistinguishable. Interestingly however, in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), it is not the fear of technological singularity that fuels the narratives, but rather a fear of insurmountable governmental power that utilizes technology to come into direct and unmediated contact with life—further splintering and thus shattering attempts at community building.
 
 Yasmina Jaksic is an English PhD candidate at York University. Her doctoral research focuses on contemporary Asian-Anglophone Cultures and Literatures of diaspora and double-consciousness. 
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".