The BBC reports that a recent poll of 60 eminent world scientists have voted Ridley Scott's Blade Runner the best science fiction film to date.

The 1982 movie which takes place in 2019 is loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and is set in a dystopian futuristic vision of Los Angeles.

Chris Frith of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, explains that film won for two reasons: it's discussion of how to tell a human from a machine and the empathy test used by the movie's policemen "is not far away from the sort of thing that cognitive neuroscientists are actually doing today," he said.

I have to agree on this one. In our emerging neurosociety, our survival depends on understanding empathy.