How to Mass-Manufacture Humanoid Robots

What kind of materials, minerals, and supply chain would we need to create ‘Westworld’-style hosts or ‘Blade Runner’ replicants en masse?

Illustration: Sandro Rybak

“I just do eyes!” may not be the most iconic words spoken in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but they gesture toward a whole series of worldbuilding questions that have long fascinated fans (read: me, maybe only me). For a movie about victims of interplanetary exploitation seeking justice and standing up to corporate and state oppression, the supply chains of Blade Runner are surprisingly underexplored. If genetic designer Hannibal Chew does, in fact, “just do eyes” in his work for the Tyrell Corporation, who does the other parts? Is there a person who only does bones or skin? (According to a 1997 Blade Runner video game, there is.) And who exactly are Chew’s suppliers of vitreous humor? (Assuming that’s the material Chew’s putting into replicant eyes and not some alternative polymer.) Is he a subcontractor or a full employee? How much of Earth’s economy serves the manufacture of the off-world’s army of replicants?

Now, in the third season premiere of Westworld, the mystery that surely gripped audiences for the two years between seasons, in which the hosts fled their carefully curated environment for the real world, will again be broached: How the hell will the hosts manage maintenance on their fragile bioengineered bodies in a brand-new biome without the benefits of a full repair shop? How will their immune systems handle the new environments? What if Dolores gets an STD? What if Bernard needs cortical fluid again? Come to think of it, what’s in cortical fluid?

Of course, Westworld follows in a long sci-fi tradition of humanoid robots exhibiting total indifference to maintenance and supply chains except as short-lived McGuffins. In science fiction, a lot of attention goes to the software side of creating sentient A.I. — it’s a topic that lets otherwise-vacuous narratives pretend they’re really asking Smart Questions about “what it means to be human.” Meanwhile, the hardware (and, in some cases, wetware) side of these creations gets hand-waved away into a solved manufacturing problem — as much an externality as the extractive labor conditions that made the screen you’re using right…