A chatbot romance isn’t all that unusual

Rejection, apparently, is optional or nil. Forget about marriage and divorce. Lawyers? Why bother? The entire electronic exercise is fake anyway. Couples therapists need not apply.

“Blade Runner” is a science-fiction film that made its debut in 1982. It wasn’t a hit with movie buffs when it was released and many critics didn’t cotton to it either due, in large part, to its slow pace. But, through the decades, it has become a cult classic. It now has legions of fans. Even skeptical critics have come around. A sequel (not terribly successful) has also been made.

In the original, synthetic humans, or so-called “replicants,” are targets for elimination by a hunter, a former police officer, charged with “retiring” the androids; he is portrayed by Harrison Ford in a futuristic (and decidedly dismal) Los Angeles.

The winsome Sean Young plays an attractive manufactured creature, a replicant. Ford, after considerable analysis, figures out that Young is indeed an artificial individual (with a limited “life” span, by the way). No matter. He still winds up caring for her in his own way. But there’s little doubt that an ethereal relationship with a bogus being communicating on a smartphone or laptop screen is not quite the same as the celluloid Ford-Young couple.

Ford’s character is fully human; Young’s is not. But at least she is a walking, talking (and smoking) android who can show some faux emotion and behave in ways akin to a bona fide homo sapien.

In the movie, Ford seems to be smitten of the Young replicant. As the film closes, they are together, an apparent item. Score one for the android.

A MEMORY OF BILL NEUKOM: The recent passing of Bill Neukom in Seattle at age 83 brought a nostalgic email from one of his San Mateo contemporaries, Phil Rognier, who now lives in the Seattle area. Rognier pointed out that, back in the 1950s, Neukom was part of a loosely-connected gaggle of Peninsula teens who gathered at a rudimentary outdoor basketball court at South School in Hillsborough for informal contests.

Some of those impromptu affairs lasted well into a summer night; those games were sometimes illuminated by automobile lights. Facetiously, the players were referred to as members of the nonexistent “Hillsborough Athletic Club.” Neukom, a San Mateo High School alum (like Rognier), went on to much bigger things in his consequential adult life, becoming a lead attorney for Microsoft and then managing general partner of the San Francisco Giants during their World Series run earlier in this century.

SETTLEMENT TALKS PERCOLATE: The nettlesome question of regular public access to Martins Beach remains in legal limbo. Published reports indicate that representatives for the state of California and the owner of a road leading from Highway 1 to the coastside property (Menlo Park venture capitalist Vinod Khosla), have been involved in talks to avoid a trial and reach a settlement in San Mateo County Superior Court. The going has been slow, dare we say glacially so. The legal gymnastics involving access to the beach have been ongoing for at least a decade. Khosla is asserting his private property rights. The state argues that closing the road denies the public’s use of the beach (located 7 miles south of Half Moon Bay), as mandated by state law.

CANEPA LEAVES NO DOUBT: If we learned nothing else during the recent walkout by Teamsters Union trash truck drivers in several county communities, it became crystal clear that David Canepa, president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, has little or no desire to be a fair and reasonable mediator in a labor/management dispute. That ship has sailed. He left no doubt that the garbage-removal company in question, Republic Services, was entirely at fault for the drivers’ decision to strike, allowing trash to pile up in several Peninsula communities. In a threatening July 17 letter to Republic Services, Canepa referred to the firm’s employees as “our union workers.” So much for any hint of objectivity.