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Comment by __alexs | Hacker News Reader

> I expect a real test would just dump data via a port like our cars’ diagnostic port and quickly run against a trained model for what is conformant behavior vs aberrant (of course testing for manipulation, deletion, or unusual data).

Replicants are not robots. They do not have ports.

> The movie seems like an artists attempt to write about robots without really thinking about how things would work.

Neither the source material or the movies are about robots in the mechanical sense. They are somewhat about the original meaning of the word though: https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135634400/science-diction-the...

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Exactly. They're biological. They're genetically human. If they were robots the VK test in the first film would have been a quick x-ray to see if the subject is made out of metal.

Maybe not robots as we understand them today... but the robots in Karel Čapek's R.U.R. were the same: artificially created, but biological, humanoids.

Robots don’t have to be made of metal. I’m using the term in that they are artificial humanoids that are created and programmed.

I think these are distinct from some purely biological humanoid that is the result of genetic engineering where it was evolved and gene hacked toward some purpose.

I am calling replicants robots in that they are manufactured out of their goopsacks or whatever and the designers have a lot of precise leeway over what and how they design them vs what biology forces them to do. They are etching codes on their eyeballs so I figured they could have some memory audit function and a way to extract that memory and thus a way to analyze a segment of time for aberration.

And then just never monitor their software for bugs due to exceptional edge cases?

> Replicants are not robots. They do not have ports.

This is a design flaw and sort of what I mean. I’m supposed to believe they have this synthetic organism so precise they can program lifespans and implant memories and don’t have a better way to debug it? Of course anything is possible as it’s fiction, but this is part of my belief is that they thought of something that looked cool and backed into the reasoning (ie, this Shakespeare memorization technique looks cool so they wrote this movie rationale of how this was precise and scientific [or at least the in movie characters think it is]).

The designers of the androids do not want them to be detected as non-human and killed, hence they do not program in a debug function.

This is a major plot point in the book.

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