I remember that movie and indeed it foreshadowed debates that should have been happening all along. It was at a SIGGRAPH conference in the late 1980s where I attended a workshop that discussed the concept of synthetic actors, pretty much the premise of Looker, at the time when we who worked in computer graphics were seeing an explosion in functionality, raising the state of the art from wireframe to solid modeling and photo realistic ray tracing. The session had a brief discussion of the possibilities of digitizing the image and voice of a person to be used for automated productions, and there were a few working actors in the audience who vigorously protested that notion saying it would endanger their livelihoods if producers and directors could dispense with humans in favor of digital synthetic actors.
The fact is that digital production in that era was not up to speed to achieve that yet, it still required literal months of processing time to create even short films like the ones Pixar was doing back then. Toy Story was a cinematic breakthrough in 1995 but still looked like a cartoon, so the debate had cooled off and no one was pursuing a solution to the synthetic actor issue.
Finally, after more than 3 decades the issue came to the fore as current computer technology is indeed fast enough to displace human actors with synthetic ones. I hope the actors got some strong guard rails put around synthetic actors.
