joy

No one but Ana de Armas could have played Joi in Blade Runner 2049. Naturally I'm biased in that I find her utterly charming. Her character, Joi, is an AI that offers Joe (aka K) warm companionship that is otherwise missing in the bleak world he inhabits. It's what makes (spoilers!!!!) her death such a gut punch. And personally, I find the relationship quite sweet, but there's a lot of discussion around the "real-ness" of her affection for him that I think misreads what the Blade Runner films go to great lengths to say about the nature of humanity and identity.

Most comments I've read online argue that none of Joi's love for Joe was real. The proof, they'll say, is in the large hologram that comes to Joe when he's at his lowest, saying that she can fix his loneliness and even that he looks like a "good Joe". She's just another product that's been conditioned as a yes-(wo)man, who will placate his every wish and has no agency or consciousness of her own to function as a prerequisite for a real relationship. In short, it's just another case of a machine supplanting real human connection, and this is an understandable perspective, particularly in our culture which has been saturated with LLMs designed to do just that as they harvest your data for mega-corps. It's just another mechanism of control.

I won't dispute the fact that Joi was conditioned by Wallace Corp. She obviously was, since they designed and created her. But where I think things get murky is that we forget that Joe isn't (strictly speaking) natural-born human himself. He's a replicant. So how do we know he isn't just simulating consciousness as well? How do we know he wasn't conditioned to think or act in certain ways? Again, he obviously was, since he was created by the same corporation, just for a different reason. Ironically, in the world of 2049, he suffers many of the same charges that we would lay against Joi. He's not considered a person like natural-born humans are, and is treated like a disposable tool if he's not fit for purpose. Indeed, we see the threat of this in the film itself, but that is not the end of his character. He grows.

When Joe learns that (spoilers!!!!) he's not the miracle-child, born of a replicant and human romance, he's deeply shattered, and yet that doesn't negate his value or values (plural). He risks and ultimately gives up his life for something he believes in. He claims his agency, his identity, his importance in a way that's not defined by his programming. So, I wonder, who's to say that Joi doesn't do the same?

We don't get a good look under the hood, so to speak, at what makes Joi tick, but we can see some clues. She privately exhibits jealousy towards the prostitute she synced with for a three-way. She urges Joe to bring her with him, despite knowing she could "die" (or however you want to phrase that for an AI). She shows concern when he's knocked unconscious. And maybe some of this is her programming. The name Joe, while being common, is apparently a general term of endearment to her. But then again, we are all conditioned in one way or another. If Joe's story gives us any indication, it's not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you. Conditioning alone cannot eliminate personhood. It can only limit it, that is, if you allow it to.

I think this is what the Blade Runner films are ultimately about: our attempts to define personhood and human-ness according to spurious categories like rationality, displays of empathy, or God-awful metaphysics of a "soul" (whatever the hell that is) ultimately tempt us to abandoning our own humanity in our inhumanity to others. Both Joe and Joi are alike in their un-humanness in the eyes of the world, but that doesn't need to dictate the reality or importance of their relationship. The same, after all, would have been said of a replicant and a human, or (to use a real-life example) even two different "types" of human today!

My uncle and I had a fun, half-drunk conversation about this. Historically, people have always dehumanised other people for one reason or another. Usually profit, but we make up all sorts of weird shit to justify it. Think about phrenology and all that crap. Naturally, the "inhuman" subgroup grows tired of their oppression and then we wake up one morning to discover we've treated a group of people terribly. It's obvious to everyone that they're "not really" human until it's not, and that's when stuff starts to break. In Blade Runner we see this in the Lieutenant's dogged attempts to keep a secret for the sake of "order", and this is really not so different to real life. How inconvenient is it, generally, to undermine the system that keeps a whole lot of people in line?

The Jois of the world might not fit some abstracted, metaphysical definition of humanity today, but we'll just shift the goalposts until it's not possible anymore. Humanity is something that has and will continue to evolve. We're not God's gift to Earth. (We might even be the opposite!) So perhaps we need to ground our subjectivity in something other than myths because the idea of a self is far grander and stranger, I think, than we are prepared to admit.