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…