2019 is a blessed year for science fiction fans. It is a crucial year for Neo-Tokyo, in Katsuhiro Otomo’s cult manga Akira. But it is also and especially the year that Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is set in.

(Adapted from an Article published in LeMonde)

We’re in 2019 reality. Los Angeles is not yet completely overtaken by the pollution shown by Ridley Scott. But the androids that are at the heart of Blade Runner’s plot are already there – albeit in a very different form from the Replicants, these artificial beings impossible to differentiate from a human being without resorting to a complex test.

Replicants in 2019 reality do not haunt the basements of large mega-cities, but rather the depths of the Web. And they are everywhere, as the New York magazine summarizes in a long article entitled “How much of the Internet is fake? “.  A lot, it turns out. A substantial portion of website traffic is done by automated programs and not by humans. Some are useful and well known, like Google’s crawlers who roam the Web to index all pages and their updates, almost in real time. Others, on the other hand, are designed to pass as humans. Their goal is simple: to increase the statistics of visits or views, or even click on advertisements. You can buy thousands of views of a YouTube video for a few euros; and there are automated networks that click on ads to “inflate” their numbers and bring earnings to the more or less legitimate sites that host them.

The problem is such that in 2013, according to the Times, almost half of the clicks on YouTube were made by robots – making the company’s tech people fear a phenomenon of “inversion”: Once the clicks of the machines would exceed those of the humans, the anti-machine tools would end up considering the human traffic as being the “fake” one, and would turn against the legitimate users of the site.

The “Inversion moment” officially never arrived; Without achieving the complexity of the Blade Runner Voight-Kampff test, the anti-spam tools have improved. The most common was, historically, the captcha, which asked the user to decipher one or two badly written words to prove that they were a human. The test proved too simple in the face of increasingly sophisticated robots: it has largely been replaced by a more analytical test, which asks the user to identify objects on images. Google, and others, are already working on a new generation of tools that analyze how the mouse moves on the screen to guess if it’s being manipulated by a real being.

But knowing that it is a human who clicks is not always enough. The Russian propagandists of the Internet Research Agency, who have tried to influence the US presidential election, are very human, as are the employees of the “click farms” who inflate the views on YouTube of their customers.

And as control tools improve, so do the skills of those who generate fake traffic.

In the past two years, simple AI tools have made it much easier to create “deepfakes”, these faked – and mostly pornographic – videos in which the face of a person is superimposed, in a relatively convincing way, on a character of a video. “ The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause… The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself” says in a rather disillusioned interview to the Washington Post actress Scarlett Johansson, a regular victim of deepfakes.

The worst is perhaps to come: on the Internet, pornographic innovations usually find other usage, and 2019 could be a good year for shady political videos. Because at the end of the day, one of the biggest differences between Blade Runner’s 2019 and the one we’re about to experience is that “replicating”is not just a multinational thing, as is the Tyrell Corporation in the film. Today, everyone, or almost everyone, can for a small cost buy or build a small robot factory. More than was foreseen by the original book by Philip K Dick on which Blade Runner was based on, the Replicants are now truly amongst us.

Having said that, Happy 2019 !