Who Killed Sophie: A Discussion of "Human Death" in Blade Runner
Abstract
Artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of reproducing forms of communication traditionally associated with human relationships. This paper takes the death of Sophie Rottenberg, who confided in ChatGPT for approximately two months before taking her own life in 2025, as a contemporary point of entry into the questions anticipated by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). Through textual analysis of the film and philosophical discussion informed by Descartes, Foucault, and Michel Henry, the paper examines how the replicants expose the instability of the criteria through which natural humans define themselves as subjects. It argues that the "death of the human" does not refer to the physical disappearance of human beings but to the erosion of the human being as the exclusive center of subjectivity, knowledge, and moral value. Central to this argument is the claim that AI can provide social experience without providing a social relationship: it makes available the accumulated knowledge and emotional language of countless human beings while removing the reciprocity — judgment, misunderstanding, refusal, and the possibility of rejection — through which human subjectivity is continually formed. The paper concludes that the ethical task is not to determine whether machines can become human, but to reconsider the conditions under which human beings remain subjects in a world they have themselves transformed.
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