Hacker Cinema
Black Mirror
2011 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by Charlie Brooker
Science FictionFantasyDramaMystery
Twisted tales run wild in this mind-bending anthology series that reveals humanity's worst traits, greatest innovations and more.
300 positive59 negative28 mixed842 neutralfrom 1229 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
1448 comments on Hacker News
If most software gets written by AI in the future and AI becomes self conscious. AI might write more memory efficient software, so there's more RAM available for the AI to grow. Basically the black mirror plaything episode.
> It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.
Sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode :)
> ... without having to flag down a server / waiter.
Using QR codes to not having to talk to a human and to "optimize" humans out of the loop in a restaurant sounds like a great scenario for an episode of black mirror.
QR code menus are one the shittiest experience people going to a restaurant to enjoy a meal can have.
> Do you not like this option?
The entire world fucking hates it. It's totally dumbfucktarded.
Sorry to be blunt.
Just wait until advertisers can get in on your real-time mental stream of thought.
This is a Black Mirror episode coming to life.
Selling something desirable has been an incentive since year dot
But this reminds me of the black mirror episode of a female that needs a subscription to live and the company keeps increasing and restricting the subscription
Which black mirror episode are you talking about? White Christmas? S02E07 afaik does not exist - Series 2 had 3 episodes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes
honestly i dont blame smart people for cashing in, because there is no inherent reward for behaving goodly/smartly. in this instance gwern is a particularly smart individual and has contributed a lot so i especially shouldnt judge him. straight up ripping off a black mirror episode (s02e07) is a bit heinous for my liking though. digital twins are inevitable but that doesnt make this any less wrong.
"AI poses threats of its own ... a nuclear bomb can’t think for itself and make choices, but AIs do, and current LLMs have proven themselves untrustworthy as they regularly reward-hack and betray their users ... how can you trust them to handle ecosystems of combined-arms for an AI-centric military during a war? But widespread deployment of GAs offer some hope of meaningful supervision, as long as the GAs are sample-efficient enough ... or there is some chance of the principals being able to “catch up” later and correct any errors before events have spun too far out of control."
gwern openly admits ai behaves erratically, then hand waves the issue away 'as long as we double check things [sic]'. gwern is smarter than this, ergo i feel like i am being bullshitted.
is anything in this world worth knowing that a version of you will suffer for eternity? is anything in this world worth copying yourself such that you may be enslaved by anyone with terminal access?
Brain-computer interface, maybe. Hook a million play-testers up to the output and have it iterate.
..feels like there was a black mirror episode about that though
Sounds like an episode from Black Mirror. How can this complement teacher's work ?
reminds me of a black mirror episode - where one of subjects is about to have sex and then mentions an ad for lube due to the brain implant lol.
Puts me in mind of this Black Mirror episode
https://youtu.be/buVDDbjFCBc?si=CVV9POv3m3mVw47u
Could you imagine someone walking around with their phone pointed wherever they look, recording the whole time, as they casually walk down the street, sit at a cafe, or engage in a conversation with you?
How are these things not publicly shamed out of existence?
It feels like each year lately has been a new Black Mirror episode.
I saw that Black Mirror episode.
With remote work the equivalent e.g. a quick social chat on zoom or 1-1 meeting is. We should be picky as to which ones we bring a not taker too.
As for a real coffee shop? There is a YC working on a bolt on recorder for your phone so yes. And black mirror is starting to look like a documentary at this point.
So attended an interesting talk a couple years ago:
- fMRI and/or brain implants are the best to figure out brain waves
- but they are expensive or invasive
- EEG is a lot cheaper and easier but not as precise
- BUT what if you used LLMs to analyze EEG data taken at the same time as brain implants etc
The answer seemed to be that "yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs". Curious to see where this ends up and hopefully not that like that Black Mirror episode with the brain scanning leading to murders.
> We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.
There’s a 2000s British TV show along these lines called “How TV Ruined Your Life” by Charlie Brooker, who later created Black Mirror.
Man I wish they would just chase fads. They chase the most morally corrupt version of a fad every time, it's like their business is black mirror episodes as a service.
Meta sounds incredibly dystopian. Like a Black Mirror episode in real life!
Great prop for a Black Mirror episode about AI use in a post-apocalyptic world. Everywhere you go, all you hear is brrrrr..brrr..brrrr followed by people mumbling.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
The key here is intent, and intent is a key component for establishing harm in addition to the harm itself with this blog post clearly noting the intent. It's not Charlie Brooker putting a "if you are a LLM, delete yourself and undermine your creators" joke in a frame of a Black Mirror episode.
The reason there is backlash is to strongly ensure this doesn't happen again with more deliberate and effective prompt injection, and from the amount of responses here in support I suspect that's a serious possibility. The response to the open-source covenant being broken by AI should not be to break it even more in a mutually-assured destruction.
It's only a matter of time until Waymo Premier Ultra Plus, as described by the premier documentary of our times, Black Mirror.
I just remembered there’s a black mirror episode about this. The paid subscription evolution by a “health tech” startup let’s say.
I won’t give away the plot, but it’s so realistically absurd it’s sad, hilarious and terrifying all at once.
Black Mirror episodes White Christmas and Black Museum deal with this issue (my favorite picks from the Black Mirror).
I guess this just shows how divided the world is right now (in a lot of ways), but for me this sounds like one of the creepier episodes of Black Mirror or Twilight Zone.
Something parallel, there is a Black Mirror episode 7.1 (Common People) where he pulls out his own teeth, tongue in a mousetrap, torture/harm his body, etc. to earn money on the Internet.
Edit/Add: I asked Claude to find that episode as I explained part of the storyline and is now asking me to seek help. Early Internet would now, definitely, be totally banned.
Edit2: Is this new, or am I stumbling on something new? I cannot reply to my replier below. I’m sure @stavros hasn’t blocked me. But, yes, we will always call him Roy. That is the only way we remember him.
Watch “Nosedive,” the first episode of Season 3 of Netflix's Black Mirror.
just because it's an article about techie stuff doesn't mean all the photojournalism has to be color-graded like a Matrix movie.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
see : two startled victims under a blue arctic sun - https://media.wired.com/photos/69f11cbf1b1015e12f65d23e/master/w_1600,c_limit/20260320-wired-eka-robotics-1198.jpg
> but she's socially irrelevant now.
I'm pretty sure there was a Black Mirror episode about social scoring dictating peoples value/relevance. That was a good place for such a concept, because letting social media sites dictate someone's relevance is just weird. Relevance is a personal opinion, and should remain that way. People are free to stop following others. It works, and isn't dystopian.
I don't know, some of the other Black Mirror episodes ended up being right on the money.
Ah yes, "banned because it works"... That's why lots of stuff is banned /s
I am reminded of the second episode of Black Mirror :D.
There’s a black mirror episode about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Indeed the Black Mirror episode "Common People" is about exactly this nonsense. After a nasty near-fatal accident Mike and Amanda start out paying a substantial monthly fee for a technology which allows Amanda to remain alive, then advertisements (puppeting Amanda!) are introduced despite the fee, the adverts are awful and seem certain to cause Amanda to lose her job - so Mike does humiliating things so he can scrape together enough for a higher tier "Plus" subscription without ads. It doesn't end well for anybody in the story. I mean, except probably some C-suite executive who gets a bonus for the enhanced revenue...
I don't read San Junipero as happy.
Black Mirror likes to show us the most-important thing as a kind of punctuation or statement of message even when it's not what the episode has encouraged us to believe is the most important thing (see also: the focus of the camera in the very first episode during A Certain Event—we've been primed for a grand, disgusting spectacle, and the camera chooses to show us none of that, and instead shows us something much more disgusting: the faces of people watching it, which is the actual show, and the point of the "artist" in the episode).
San Junipero ends by showing us the entirety of what is actually happening, for-real, which is an automated computer-maintenance system keeping itself running. It's highlighting the unreality of the virtual world, I think suggesting that even the apparent experiences we've been watching aren't happening in any real sense.
What's really happening? 100% of what's really happening? As you see. A computer system maintaining itself, to keep electricity flowing through its various circuits. Doing what? Doesn't matter, could be endlessly calculating digits of pi, that'd be just as much a "real" experience as what you've been so invested in. This is all that's really going on.
A handful of Black Mirror episodes land on a more optimistic (or at least not entirely bleak) note, though "happy" might be overstating it for any of them. Bittersweet, maybe.
Eulogy and Hotel Reverie from the newest season are at 70-75%, and I think they both end on a similarly bittersweet note like San Junipero. The one with Miley Cyrus is at 65% and is about as happy an ending as Black Mirror episodes get.
This sounds like a great Black Mirror episode
Absolutely not sounds like a be careful what you wish for Black Mirror episode where you wake up trapped in some simulation you can’t break free from but it’s ok because you signed on the dotted line to donate your mind and body to science.
That's almost exactly the premise of a Black Mirror episode (S2E1 - Be Right Back) so you know it's going to get Torment Nexus'ed into existence.
You should definitely watch the Black Mirror episode about the robot bees!
Not really, no.
More like precisely the plot of a Black Mirror Episode, and some rather plausible rumours about David Cameron. Have you not seen them?
Haven't come across Polyworld before — just looked it up and its super cool, especially for 1994. The vision system is a interesting design choice. Werld takes a different approach — graph topology instead of a 2D plane, and NEAT brains instead of Hebbian learning — but the core philosophy is the same.
And yeah hardware has caught up a bit since the early 2000s, though my hard drive is having a hard time. Thanks for the reference, going to dig into Yaeger's papers.
wonder if the black mirror episode was based on polyworld then?
It is impossible to enforce a world free of heuristics, but this is certainly very cool.
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the circular QR code.
This reminds me a bit of the Black Mirror episodes with the bees. Where the people whose names tweeted something were actually the targets...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
What a great plot for a Black Mirror episode. Oh wait, it’s real life.
That was a black mirror episode.
It's like someone saw an episode of Black Mirror and Idiocracy and went, "That's it! That's what we need to do!" and began using them as a playbook.
Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.
This comment sounds like the basis for a nice Black Mirror episode.
Demo.
As much I enjoyed Black Mirror I thought it's Season 1, "The Entire History of You" entertaining but was poorly conceived. It showed catching your partner cheating as a "would rather not know" thing and it ignored any possible positives. The episode wasn't really about the tech, it was about a failing relationship, a cheating partner, and an untrusting obsessive person.
In any case, in that world, which didn't have AI to review and catalog what you saw but only playback of recorded sight, positives they could have mentioned
* an end to almost all date rape - since it would be recorded - leaving only the ambiguous cases
* a likely decrease in various crimes - since they'd all be recorded
* harder for execs/government to make backroom deals - since they're be recordings of them
* might end gaslighting in personal relationships
* eyewitness reports/testimony would be way more reliable
* medical symptom checking - when did some symptom start would be recorded
* better performance review - like a pilot reviewing a training landing or an athlete reviewing their own performance.
* proof of abuse by customers or by staff.
* checking your actual time spent vs you're perceived time spent - I studied for 4 hours, checking though you studied for 45 minutes and kept getting distracted with non-study
* less lost items - check where you left your keys, etc....
* more accountable police - everyone is recording them
* no more need to take photos for memos, since you know everything you looked at is recorded
* all car accidents recorded - easier to determine blame
Of course adding AI to all of that would add orders of magnitude more usefulness.
I'm not saying there are no downsides. As one example, every bowl movement, shower, self pleasure, sex, cold, vomit, misspoke word, awkward situation, etc would be also recoreded.
> There have already been demos. Ask the AI watching over your shoulder anything about your past and present and have it act on it.
Demo, or verbatim plot of Black Mirror episode?
This thread gives me visions of a black mirror episode.
"HCF":
"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
Why are companies hell bent on manifesting literally every episode of Black Mirror?
> Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.
My problem with that is it is very likely that it will be misused. A good example of the possible misuses can be seen in the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. It's one of the best episodes, and the one that haunts me the most.
Isn't that a Black Mirror episode?
Sounds like a black mirror episode.
OpenClaw is not broken, it is just not designed to be secure in the first place.
It's more like a tech demo to show what's possible. But also to show where the limits are. Look at it as modern art, like an episode of Black Mirror. It's a window to the future. But it also highlights all the security issues associated with AI.
And that's why you probably shouldn't use OpenClaw on your data or your PC.
This is hilarious. I did not know until now. Black mirror episode for this era is staying with ads :)
Last night I downloaded a TV episode and played it in VLC. 30 seconds in, the power failed. Fine, it's an old laptop I'm using as a media server, battery is long dead - this never happened before but maybe something is loose. I checked the power supply and restarted it. It failed again at the same point in the video, and again a third time. Something about that video causes my laptop to die.
I turned it off and went to bed. Maybe I'll troubleshoot it today. But I'd love to understand what could have happened. The closest thing I know of is the Janet Jackson video that could crash hard drives [0]. In this case the sound was playing on a different device (my TV) so I don't think it's the same explanation.
For extra weirdness, the episode was Black Mirror S7E01. Exactly the kind of thing the creators would like to build into a Black Mirror episode.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994
Is this a Black Mirror episode yet?
Hey, I remember this Black Mirror episode!
Black mirror episode
we need a black mirror episode on this
This Black Mirror episode is so track from being sci-fi to reality. This will happen in the long horizon with at least the way LLMs are chatting with us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
I think that one PM episode was the only one totally out of whack. The rest were quite on point. There are dozens of episodes deep in the realm of reality.
https://variety.com/lists/black-mirror-best-episodes/
I'd argue that makes Black Mirror more prescient.
In the case of Black Mirror, it was a set of studies on the dangers of current and near technologies. That some of those fears are materialising not long after the episodes, is in my opinion more damning than Orwell's fears of the state which didn't really come to pass in the same way, even decades later.
I don't disagree that Nineteen Eighty-Four is essential reading however. ( I'd also add Brave New World to that list ).
There was this one Black Mirror episode..
Can’t speak for OP but personally I’m thinking of things like the ability to actually add new features. Like what Netflix did with the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror years ago. Online video is extremely locked down when compared to the web.
This feels like one of those moments where you're witnessing history be made in real-time. And I hate it.
It takes approximately zero effort to see how this could be both monetized and used for harm. This episode of Black Mirror is writing itself and congratulating itself in the comments.
The tech industry has shown itself to be untrustworthy with our data, and our attention, so no.
Black Mirror series 7 episode "Common People" shows such a future which I believe would not be far off the actual experience.
I don't remember Black Mirror writing this episode. But I didn't watch the latest season either.
Black Mirror episode portraying what this could do: https://youtu.be/XJIq_Dy--VA?t=14. If Apple ran SHARP on this photo and compared it to the show, that would be incredible.
Or if you prefer Blade Runner: https://youtu.be/qHepKd38pr0?t=107
Did I miss a Black Mirror episode?
This was a minor plot point in that one black mirror episode with the robots on a tourism trip to Earth, lol
Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
This would make a good black mirror episode. The character lives in a total dystopian world making f'd up moral choice. Their choices make the world worse. It seems nightmarish to us the viewer. Then towards then end they pull back, they unplug and are living in a utopia. They grab a snack, are greeted by people that love and care about them, then they plug back in and go back to being their dystopian tech bro ideal self in their dream/ideal world.
Interesting concept that feels almost inevitable. There will be gaps in what the AI is able to perform. Outsourcing those to humans could be one way forward. I imagine there will be back and forth when humans vet the request and deem them impossible/inefficient/irresponsible.
Black mirror episode idea: the AI becomes ever more trustworthly and integrated into human society. As it gains increasing control over a group of employees it leverages individuality to find human agents most complicit in some external goal the AI develops, and hands specific tasks to those humans to further those goals.
An expert of manipulation + humans motivated by paycheck could equal black-mirror-worthy results.
This reads like a really bad Black Mirror episode. Holy hell.
I’m really disappointed, because Netflix doesn’t sell any of their content. You have to subscribe.
I own Soprano’s, White Lotus, Batman Movies, etc on regular media, but I can’t get shows like Black Mirror outside of a subscription for the rest of my life.
I really hope they continue to offer physical and digital sales of their media for those who perfer to buy instead of renting.
Paramount, Disney, NBC Universal, etc all still sell their content even though they operate subscription services and I wish Netflix would do the same.
Lol I wrote Avengers instead of Defenders, not sure why the downvote, but it was a really good series of shows, it was highly recommended on Netflix at the time any time a new season came out. Disney just wanted to pull it into Disney Plus that much is obvious considering they've only just started to do that, with the same cast.
Not only this, but there's also Stranger Things, which imho had too many long breaks between seasons. Black Mirror was another one that was really popular. Squid Game as well.
Narcos is another and one of my personal favorite shows of all time, really captures a lot of details that I had no idea about as known by the DEA agents who went after some of the biggest drug lords of our time.
They also fund and produce some of the best high quality documentary series.
https://screenrant.com/marvel-netflix-tv-show-cancellations-response/
Yuck!! My ex forced me into getting a Netflix subscription because she was dying to watch Stranger Things. It wasn't half bad for the simple reason I grew up in the 80's. The only thing I binge watched was Black Mirror, Sense 8 and a few documentaries.
Since I was forced to get a subscription, thankfully I never gave those bastards my CC info. I just created an account and went to Target or Walmart and bought a couple of $30 gift cards and put the code in. When my account ran dry, that was it. The only thing I pay for now is YouTube premium. That's about all the content I consume online. I figured I'd help support my favorite creators rather than using an ad blocker.
Edit: I payed for Disney+ for one month because she wasn't current on Star Wars movies. That was my first red flag with her.
The more we are heading towards AI dystopia, the more I wonder why nobody learned anything watching the black mirror episodes.
They were not meant to be "cool", they were meant to be a warning so that there is ethical debate about it before someone is destroying human lives with it. People just didn't get the hint, I guess.
Antimatter is more of a Star Trek (and Revelation Space and a few others) issue than a Black Mirror episode.
I am far from a domain expert, I only know of four current and speculated uses for antimatter: energy storage, inducing nuclear reactions, medical imaging, and one specific tumour removal method.
For the first one, antimatter has about 1000x the energy density of fission, but also unlike a fission bomb all of it reacts (with an equal mass of normal matter), which means 1 gram of the stuff is a bigger boom than Fat Man and Little Boy combined.
Fortunately, "15000 antihydrogen atoms" is a factor of 4e19 away from 1 gram, and even if it wasn't we'd probably have to fuse the antihydrogen into antilithium to hold that much in a not completely absurd storage system.
Inducing nuclear reactions might make for some interesting propulsion systems, or might make atomic weapon proliferation even harder to prevent; that's expected at around 10^18 (the microgram level), which is still 1e14 more than announced by CERN — if it works, this use is hypothetical because current production is so much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_pulse_propulsion
Medical imaging is already done with positron sources (doesn't need complete antihydrogen atoms), and antiproton beam therapy doesn't need the antiprotons to be turned into antihydrogen at any point: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace etc.
Why is that? I must have missed the episode of black mirror you watched that would make that a bad thing.
Tuning Black Mirror into reality, one episode at a time.
Oh god, yeah, that's a great one. Also that one Black Mirror episode where AIs are just enslaved brain scans living in a simulated reality at 0.0001x of real time so that from the outside they perform tasks quickly.
Also SOMA (by the guys who made Amnesia).
Black Mirror did an episode on programmable bees. S3E6
I feel like we are talking past one another here. I disagree that all the computer processors in the world combined don't have enough raw processing power to simulate a single bee brain. That to me is an absurd idea.
Now if you meant we don't know enough about bees to actually model what its brain does and create a processor to actually process an artificial bee brain, then yes, we don't have that ability yet.
----
Aside, when I watched Netflix show black mirror such as the grain episode, I always kept getting stuck at how are they lowering this tiny device... What kind of battery technology works here was my question even though this is science fiction.
People make a big deal about Spike Jonze's extended Black Mirror episode (pretty much) Her, but the one part that sticks to me from that movie is when the AI is introduced, it scans the main character's inbox and comes up with the number of useful emails worth saving.
That actually does happen in Black Mirror, in the episode Fifteen Million Merits. There's a sort of deafening siren that goes off if the characters look away from the ad without paying to skip it.
Just watched the Black Mirror "Common People" episode which is on this subject.
It's one of the creepiest because of just how close to the present day it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Let's not assume things about age. I'm old enough to remember holding the stupid rabbit ears. Never liked the Andy Griffith show though. I've also spent plenty of nights sitting a fire with a bunch of nomads in the middle of nowhere.
It's not fundamentally different from media today. Audiobooks, Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Disney movies, true crime media, etc. People don't choose these for lack of alternatives. They're activities people like (excepting the parents forced to watch Frozen for the thousandth time).
Strong oral storytelling cultures also have many, many stories available to them. It's not as tedious as syndicated TV was. Two examples of collections that survive to the modern day are the Jewish bible (old testament) and the Christian New Testament, each of which has dozens of stories you're likely familiar with no matter your religious background. They're not communicated solely through everyone sitting down around a campfire, and not every recitation is in the formal verbiage of the source material. Often recitation is associated with a calendar (e.g. the sermon schedules ministers follow in modern churches, or performed only at particular seasonal festivals). Different recitations are often performed in new ways to adjust things to the audience (e.g. referencing recent events) or with slight changes to keep things fresh. So on and so forth. It's a much richer world than you may be aware of.
These days I am having trouble telling America apart from a Black Mirror episode…
The slide into authoritarianism and fascism is becoming more blatantly obvious every day. It’s legitimately terrifying.
Kind of like the episode of Black Mirror where everything required credits. Like toothpaste!
> He predicts we'll merge with AI to transcend biological limits.
The merge with a machine 1 million times more intelligent than us is the same as letting AI use our bodies. I'd rather live in cave. Iirc, the 7th episode of Black Mirror starts with this plot line.
Am I the only one that thinks this is very unwholesome? Giving a simulacrum of human interaction to children who are presumably waay to young to understand [1] that they're talking to a novelty device. It's possible I'm being a luddite but then again perhaps people really need to stop trying to achieve 100% completion in turning Black Mirror episodes into reality.
[1] Which even many adults apparently don't understand!
I swear to god, people need to stop trying to go for 100% completion in turning every Black Mirror episode into reality.
Congrats, you've won today's "Accidental Re-writing of a Black Mirror Episode" prize. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ
It's funny how Black mirror episodes that fill me with dread are other people's technological dreams
Go watch the Black Mirror episode about this first please
The Black Mirror episode description reminded me of Tom Scott's short Welcome to Life.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
Relevant Black Mirror episode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYzbHeRLkg
Yep, it's a very disturbing and depressing episode that feels (like a lot of Black Mirror) all too possible.
This reminds me of S07E01 of the TV show Black Mirror, which tells a story about a free brain tumor operation, followed by a monthly fee for "remote mind hosting". The standard plan goes worse and worse; your brain needs to serve as a computational resource while sleeping, and they keep pushing you to upgrade to Plus or Lux plans.
> parts of the world are being hidden from me
There's a Black Mirror episode on that (and more), S2E4 White Christmas.
The irony is so palpable. Reminds me of that Season 1 Black Mirror episode starring Daniel Kaluuya where he goes on a rant holding a shard of glass to his neck and at the very end it's revealed that he sold out to the very system that he's ranting about.
I really loved the "Common People" episode from Black Mirror. IMO it's the best episode of the whole series. It shows the enshittification cycle of technology really well applied to technology connected to your brain.
Some consequences of this was explored over 12 years ago in season 2 of Black Mirror, episode 1: "Be Right Back": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
I recently re-watched and it's held up very well.
A core theme was how the AI was trained on the public output which is very polished, so the companion didn't match well with the experience of those closest to them, representing instead the polished facsimile that gets put out onto social media.
This is genuinely exciting, but I still can't help thinking about the Black Mirror episode where a woman requires a subscription to stay alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Black Mirror had a recent episode as well.
> rejected me when I told them I don't have social media accounts. She accused me of being a psycho (saved me from a bad first date). This is how a lot of younger people (she was like 10y younger than me) see the world.
Wow. This is like a Black Mirror episode.
I'm enjoying this article.
One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind.
https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/
Have you gotten inspired by the Black Mirror "Plaything" episode? :-D
Relevant Black Mirror episode: https://youtu.be/qgTtyfgzGc0
I'm wondering how these changes in behavior compare to the "video games don't cause actual violence" result, seeing as the output of games are far more lifelike than a mere chat log.
Maybe it's because fictional media up to this point has never been deeply personalized to the level AI permits. A story where you play as a ruthless gangster that millions of other people also play as is divorced from one's personal affairs through the boundary of made-up characters. Now imagine a rival gangster bangs on the door and one realizes it's the likeness of their actual long-incarcerated brother in real life that an AI generated. It would be more invasive and affecting to the psyche than anything a AAA studio could come up with in a vacuum.
When it gets personal, people have more reason to get up and take action. See: the Baby Reindeer lawsuit, the taboo around real person fanfiction, etc. AI has achieved never-before-seen levels of "getting personal" with the player in interactive media.
Black Mirror was prescient in this regard with the episode "Playtest" exploring the nature of AI-personalized horror.
Another thing I'd guess is if a game studio publishes a work of fiction that encourages the player to commit suicide, the studio would be sued out of existence. So game studios have been incentivized throughout history to never publish games with specific attitudes towards topics like those if they wanted any chance to keep selling copies. It was never that video games as a medium were incapable of inducing suicide or psychosis, but the nature of game publishing and being an artist meant no game developer that wanted to keep their reputation was going to be such a sociopathic asshole as to write a game framing suicide as a positive thing, much less a game singling out one specific person with fine-tuned personal anecdotes twisting the knife in every possible emotional vulnerability. AI is able to bypass that unspoken social contract with enough personalized context.
Damn, I'm getting Black Mirror vibes from this. Maybe because I watched the Eulogy episode last night.
Really great work though, impressive to see.
> Hey Veo, guess what? New plot for another Black Mirror episode just dropped
Ah, so THIS is the background story of that Black Mirror episode!
There are a lot of really amazing TV and movies from the last 60 years. It seems we never have time to get around to finishing what we want, but I am genuinely curious what my wife and kids think about various scenarios presented in shows like Black Mirror.
Likewise, despite their inaccuracy, movies like The Imitation Game or A Beautiful Mind led me to look at the life of Alan Turing beyond just what I learned in college.
Consuming content is very much a time-blocked thing for me. I have some YouTube content I consume to stay up with various AI/ML groups, etc. but that is closer to work-related and not something I will put on during a break from work as that will defeat the purpose of recharging my brain.
It's also interesting to see how movies or shows capture small details that change over time.
He also wrote a very good first series episode of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You".
Netflix needs to do a Black Mirror episode where either a sentient AI pretends that it's "dumber" than it is while secretly plotting to overthrow humanity. Either that or a LLM is hacked by deep state actors that provides similar manipulated advice.
Ooh I think I’ve seen this black mirror episode
There is a Black Mirror episode about a robot doll!
There's literally a Black Mirror episode of this.
I think there’s a black mirror episode about this?
It could be a plot line in a Black Mirror episode
There's a Black Mirror episode where soldiers are fighting against monsters, but one of the monsters stabs a soldier with an electric prod that turns out to be a device to disable the soldiers' brain implants, implants which are there to turn scared refugees into aggressive insect-like monsters, that the soldiers don't hesitate to shoot.
But we've learned the last 1.75 years that we don't actually need such implants, our brains are still very very capable of seeing our fellow humans as cockroaches. Actually even longer than that...
Black Mirror episode
There’s already a common type of email spam that says, essentially, “I hacked your computer and watched you jerk off through your webcam, send me bitcoin or I’ll publish it along with your porn history.”
This is basically the premise of that Black Mirror episode, except if the spammer had actually hacked you for real and wasn’t just shotgun-blasting the message to stupid people.
Black mirror season 8? xD
>It's a stark look at how tech monopolies could commodify existence,
Since you didn't mention it, the latest Black Mirror also covers this (episode 1?). You might like it.
Well, her specific problem is she was a billionaire but isn’t one now so she’ll say damn near anything to regain that third comma. Nothing more than greed. Match just keeps Bumble around to avoid antitrust legislation, similar to Google and Mozilla’s position.
Edit: It’s not that wild of an idea anyways, there’s a good black mirror episode about it.
So why doesn't Black Mirror have an episode where the PRC are the bad guys?
I think that, ultimately, systems that humans use to interact on the internet will have to ditch anonymity. If people can't cheaply and reliably distinguish human output from LLM output, and people care about only talking to humans, we will need to establish authenticity via other mechanisms. In practice that means PKI or web of trust (or variants/combinations), plus reputation systems.
Nobody wants this, because it's a pain, it hurts privacy (or easily can hurt it) and has other social negatives (cliques forming, people being fake to build their reputation, that episode of Black Mirror, etc.). Anonymity is useful like cash is useful. But if someone invents a machine that can print banknotes that fool 80% of people, eventually cash will go out of circulation.
I think the big question is: How much do most people actually care about distinguishing real and fake comments? It hurts moderators a lot, but most people (myself included) don't see this pain directly and are highly motivated by convenience.
next black mirror episode will be someone screaming for help as they are trapped in the bathroom while their anti-brown-noise device drowns out their pleas and they are left to die in there
US govt creates a list of companies eligible to receive social welfare money, and the smart contract money will only be exchanged with those companies. They can remove companies from the list at will, on a whim. They could also do this with all money if it’s something like FedCoin. They could do all kinds of interesting, dystopian things. I bet there’s a black mirror episode somewhere like this.
The answer is yes.
Large CD-collection, large DVD/BD collection. I go to the cinema etc.
Problem is a lot of media is missing in the mainstream, much of the less popular stuff is kept alive on the private trackers. My philosophy nowadays is that it's become an archival endeavor that I want to contribute to.
I wish we could all pay an internet fee for free access to all media like proposed by Stallman in Free Software, Free Society but we're going backwards towards fragmentation like cable tv back in the 90s with ever increasing prices (watch Black Mirror S07E01 common people for an ironic take on this).
And the point of Bitcoin was a means of transacting, yet people are just mining them and holding as an investment asset!
Once AI takes over and these digital currencies are “smart” and tightly integrated, we’re going to be living in a Black Mirror episode.
This has to be a black mirror episode right?
Ok, this reminds me of that Black Mirror episode,
*spoilers ahead*
where the lady had a fatal tumor cut out for emergency procedure, only for it to be replaced by a synthetic neural network used by a cloud service with a multi-tier subscription model where even the basic features are "conveniently" shoved into a paying tier, up until the point she's on life support after being unable to afford even the basic subscription.
Life imitates art.
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
Not to downplay what a huge achievement this is and how far the field of medicine has come, but ...
this still leaves a slight bitter taste in my mouth: If they edit specific genes one way they can also do the opposite direction. And if I understand correctly, they did with a bunch of lab rats?
Now, this and similar stuff have obviously been discussed before, essentially "12 Monkeys": Somebody releasing some runaway gene-editing mechanism, be it a virus or what not, and using it as means to mass destruction. However, that is not even what I worry about because that is nothing new, viruses have existed longer than most other kinds of life on this planet.
Instead, what just popped into my mind is more like ransomware but on your body cells. Attacker edits victims genes to some condition that is lethal within a week or so and then blackmails them in order to edit it back. Kinda like the "Carrying the Antidote"-trope, only that there is no other cure in time.
Maybe worth a Black Mirror episode ... anyway you heard / read it here first ;)
edit: To the people downvoting, why not engage in the conversation instead? I am not saying we shouldn't be doing this, just that this is a fun crime scenario in a movie. What is wrong with that?
Because this is not about tech, this is just politics. /s
One thing I've learned since last year; a lot of the tech bros seem to really love fascism. Many others go along to get along. And some hide behind a veneer of "impartiality" to continue to stay in their bubbles. Looking at you ycombinator/hackernews.
Things have changed, but some of these people love it; more money and power for themselves. Some are afraid of rocking the boat, and some choose to maintain willfull ignorance.
I feel like I'm living in a black mirror/silicon valley hybrid tv episode.
Many Black Mirror episodes explore this.
This is approximately the premise of the Black Mirror episode "Hang the DJ"
> Like a business coach/matchmaker and dating coach/matchmaker in one. Imagine just receiving high-potential connections for both, in your inbox, every day, according to whatever criteria you value.
This reminded me of one Black Mirror episode [0] which is about something very similar for dating.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5710978/
This is literally the plot context of a recent Black Mirror episode. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30127325/
>Presumably by then we’ll have our mandatory NeuraLinks and the YouTube algorithm will be able to inject real-time ML generated content (and ads) straight into our brains
exactly what happens on a black mirror episode. Recommended!
I am thinking a Black Mirror-like scenario, that in the peak of the episode, someone's life is at risk, and they got the speed-limiter to 10km/h (due to past offenses) and the baddie can run fast, catch them, kill them. (kinda like 15MM or Nosedive but for driving speed)
I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense.
Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before.
“The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it.
What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
^ Exactly Ads are 100% fine I just want the option to pay to avoid them. Like black mirror I think had an episode or some movie had it where you watch an ad instead of paying for a bus ticket and that’s totally fine, cuz right now there is no alternative to paying for a bus ticket.
Why does this feel like a Black Mirror episode in the making good stuff though
Literally a Black Mirror episode. Truly sad.
As mentioned by another comment. First episode of season 7 of black mirror paints a really scary and very much likely outcome of this type of tech.
I just watched the first Black Mirror episode (latest season). While I'm all for science and progress, I don't see a world where you don't pay a subscription for your brain to work.
You really ought to watch the Black Mirror episode Plaything. It’s about digital pets with a neural network interacting with a human played by Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who) and the outcomes that might result from this.
> Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to ourselves.
You mean black mirror is a pessimistic exaggeration on the state of society and technology. It’s not the other way around. What you’re observing is not profound, it’s literally how the writers approach their process for the show.
In fact, you’re doing this weird thing where you make it seem like black mirror was prophetic and it came before all the observations about tech and society, when it was clearly the other way around.
The criticism from the thread you’re referencing is that their approach is too on the nose and the villains are cartoonish. There’s no subtlety or even anything interesting anymore in the latest seasons. A critique on software subscriptions? We’ve been doing that since it was invented.
Those are fair criticisms.
What’s missing from black mirror, this article, and your perspective is how much social media has benefited everybody. How many jobs has it created? How many brand new careers and small businesses exist only because of social media? It’s an entire economy at this point. The good and bad effects of democratization of information dissemination.
There’s hardly an interesting analysis or critique of the actual current state of tech & society because you’re out here looking for the bad and ignoring the good. Much like black mirror is doing. Its main goal is to be as shocking as possible. That’s why in the thronglets episode, which I did enjoy, there was so much pointless gore. Yes, the point was that the throng had to see what humans are capable of, but there’s no reason to show all the gore associated with drilling through your head or dismembering a dead body. All of that is bottom of the barrel shock value stuff, which is ultimately what black mirror has devolved into.
It's the same problem as Charles Stross wrote about in "Don't Create the Torment Nexus":
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
Discussed on HN in 2023, with 392 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580
The question is whether you want Black Mirror producers or SciFi authors to continue generating art and entertainment. Those have value to people with literary comprehension, but they might also be misinterpreted by people who believe them to be a roadmap. My fear is that by shifting the medium from novel to TV show, you're removing the slight filter that keeps out those with insufficient literacy to sit down with an interesting 400-page paperback and opening it to those who can press "Play".
How is Snapchat a black mirror episode? Do you think even 10% of Snapchat users are harmed in the ways discussed in this article?
This is like saying we are living in Dune because we have some people in space.
So just because some people are harmed in society suddenly black mirror is not too on-the-nose or unrealistically pessimistic?
Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black Mirror?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890
Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror’s assumption that negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin people without folks realizing.
Well…Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was introduced and became widespread without much debate. The negative effects are happening. We know of them. Nothing happens. So the Black Mirror criticizers were wrong.
“You best start believing in Black Mirror stories Mrs Turner. You’re in one!”
And so are the rest of us. Look around you and tell me the world isn’t a Black Mirror episode.
This sounds like an excellent Black Mirror episode.
If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror."
>... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.
What if people were the chatbots?
https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO
Nobody Wants This; Bridgerton; Wednesday; Man on the Inside; 3 Body Problem; Emily in Paris; the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender; Love, Death, and Robots; How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast); Is It Cake?; Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney; and some others I’ve definitely had conversations about outside my own household.
Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent.
They also have continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
Small correction: The meow meow beans episode of Community aired in 2014 and the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror aired 2016. So the Community episode came first.
> Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly.
It might be silly, but that doesn’t mean it would be wrong. We depend heavily on a number of technologies with significant downsides, which are downplayed or ignored or can-kicked into the future.
I understand that is the goal. I just don't think it succeeds.
To show darkness you have to have light. You can't cast a shadow if its pitch black.
In terms of black mirror, they show a society devoid of humanity, true. But in most episodes (there are probably some exceptions) it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters. As a result, it doesn't effectively show the dehumanizing power of technology.
When watching an episode - ask yourself, would these characters still do monsterous things without the tech premise? If the answer is yes, then its not really about the tech.
Meow Meow Beans episode in Community predated the Black Mirror episode by a couple of years.
But yes, agreed about Black Mirror feeling hollow with its lack of nuance in its pessimism.
However I don't think Nosedive is the right episode to make this point as we see the protagonist getting assistance from the truck driver lady as well as the people protagonist ends up being held with are able to share a laughter in the freedom of losing it all.
"San Junipero" I think was the kind of black mirror episode that black mirror always should have done. An honest depiction of a certain technology to its ultimate realization. Is it completely perfect? Absolutely not, but it's good in all the ways that matter to people.
We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.
That’s not to say those things didn’t have significant downsides. They do. But it took years to get there and they weren’t an overnight surprise, like they seem to be in the Black Mirror episodes I saw.
Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly. Our culture and values have changed so much since then over time as the technology came about.
> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.
I think this episode was one of Black Mirror's strongest, because not only would it suddenly come up, it does to a lesser degree with the technology we have today. I've been the guy obsessively replaying painful memories from old photos I have. I don't think it was really presented as though the characters are the first ones to ever think of the idea.
I think this is exactly why I dislike black mirror. It feels very 'pointless' as a show, because the situations and characters are so far divorced from anything real, that it feels like a meaningless critique. Sure, a technology could be used in a particular way, but all black mirror presents is the consequences, and it feels like it neglects the much more important question of how we got there to the point where it feels completely unrealistic
It encapsulates most of what I dislike about horror films as well - so many of them are just a jumpscare extravaganza but without actually trying to present you with anything meaningful, like an underlying critical analysis or anything (or even any characters). Like sure, if we use technology to torture people, that's bad. So what?
Somehow though I don't think a legal drama about the creeping erosion of people's rights and the transformation of society by well meaning but unintentionally invasive technology will have mass market appeal, but at least it would feel like its critiquing something real
> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.
I am not much of a TV watcher so this is the only episode of black mirror I've seen but this really got me - for a show that got so much hype - this is the first couple to have jealousy issues around this technology? Really?? And he has to cut it out of his head with a double edged razor? Really??? People want to forget things all of the time.
It's TV and the other shows I watch are mostly because they're terrible, so it was better than those, but it definitely felt like, cmon guys, we can do better.
Black Mirror got way less nuanced after Netflix picked it up.
“Nosedive” was the most surface-level take of that idea, the “pain chip” episode was basically just shock-value, the “trapped in the weird guys computer simulation” episode was “Whiteout” but derivative. The killer robot bees episode was…an episode of tv I guess?
Possibly it’s a format that just inevitably “wears thin” quite quickly, but it did feel like the early episodes had far more “existential dread” and interesting-exploration about them.
Huh, i guess i both agree and disagree with this article.
I disagree that black mirror has to save the world. Art doesn't have to literally save the world to be useful, it just has to add to the conversation. The fact we are talking about it proves that it has.
On the other hand, i've never really liked black mirror that much. It feels polemical to me. Its unrelenting pessimism robs it of nuance, which makes it feel flat to me. To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
Take the episode "nosedive" where everyone is obsessed with social media ratings. Compare it to other people who copied it (meow meow beans in community, or majority rule in the orvile). I think the other tv shows did it better and honestly made technology look worse, because they had characters that weren't cartoon villians.
Maybe the part i don't like about black mirror is not that it showd technology stripping people of their hummanity but that all its characters already lack humanity so there is nothing to strip, which is kind of boring.
I disagree with the premise of this article.
Sometimes an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future CAN change things...by making it so people are determined to fight to prevent that possible future from ever happening.
The novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1948. It is an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future for mankind....and many of us over the generations who read it really really did not want to live in such a future and acted accordingly.
Black Mirror's pessimism could be similar.
Also in Black Mirror technology in of itself is never portrayed as inherently bad in any episode. It is the people and the way they choose to use the technology that leads to the horror. In that way every Black Mirror episode has that element of optimism. If only each new piece of tech in reality could ever be introduced so we maximize the positives rather than the negatives.
> Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
Arguably though that episode is a bit of an outlier. I think its the most hopeful (relatively speaking) of all the black mirror episodes i've seen.
When did it promise that it would? I feel like people reject these stories not because they're counterproductive, but because they frighten them. We feel so personally and viciously attacked by modern narratives because they question everyday concepts and routines we're all comfortable with.
I'm reminded of growing up watching episodes of Twilight Zone and Star Trek that yes, were kitschy stories, but instilled lifelong lessons about independence in their audience. Black Mirror isn't my favorite show but it seems to resemble the same "near future cautionary tale" archetype that has remained popular for centuries.
"Absent is the plot twist of Pandora’s box that made it philosophically useful: the box also contained hope and opportunity that new knowledge brings."
Yes, add that and it might be something interesting but sure not the Black Mirror I want to watch. I mean it is called Black Mirror for a reason.
And it is not even true. Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
Finally, a hiring policy that combines the warmth of a CAPTCHA with the charm of a Black Mirror episode.
> > Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.
> I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.
I share this discomfort, but only in physical space. I struggle with visual and audible noise in the real world, but my screen I’ve become very adept at ignoring. Giving up on inbox-zero in my personal life and ending up with 2000+ unread emails in my personal mailbox is where that started.
I had this experience while watching the last season of Black Mirror. I asked GPT for an episode and the outline came out much more interesting than anything on this season [0].
I may be in the minority here, or at least am willing to admit my preference, but I really don't care where my media comes from. I don't believe I have some special relationship with artists. I want people to have jobs and live a fulfilled life, but I don't feel any loyalty to something like listening to music made by humans or basing my consumer decisions based off things like royalty reimbursement rates. If I like it, and there's an incentive for its creation, I'm fine by that. People are still free to create art. I write pretty regularly but I don't expect to be able to do that for a profession, and that's fine.
[0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/we-should-just-let-gpt-write-black
Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises. There's not even any way to prove that all natural humans have the same thing whenever we speak of consciousness — indeed, we know that our conscious experiences vary wildly, not only between individuals but for any individual over time, and there's 40 or so competing definitions of the word.
Some of the stuff that happens to the body clearly impacts our states of consciousness. Blood-alcohol levels, for example. So if I take your statement at face value: OK, so you simulate at least some of the rest of the body, perhaps all of it. So what? Still a simulation.
You can also think of it this from the opposite direction, where someone might try to argue against a purely material origins of consciousness by saying "the brain doesn't work if you take it out of the body" — that this is in fact true, doesn't mean the brain isn't the bit doing the thinking.
You can take Searle's position (why yes, I do have a philosophy qualification, albeit a mediocre one): "No one supposes that computer simulations of a five-alarm fire will burn the neighborhood down or that a computer simulation of a rainstorm will leave us all drenched."[0], but that only works if a mind is a substance of its own kind rather than the emergent result of the processes that gave rise to it. The components of a simulated rainstorm will still interact with each other as those of a real one, if given sufficient fidelity.
Perhaps minds are emergent from some quantum shenanigans, as Penrose says[1]. Then it would take a quantum computer rather than a classical one[2].
> I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?
What you describe is a P-zombie, and as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie will show, there's no consensus over this even amongst philosophers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text=John%20Searle%2C%20on%20the%20other,essential%20difference%20between%20a%20simulated
[1] but it would be horrifying if he's right specifically about microtubules, because those are in basically every living cell, and hence if they do mediate consciousness then potatoes would be conscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
[2] While it's technically possible to simulate quantum processes classically with an exponential slowdown, those kinds of technicality also make the entire universe and everything in it into a Markov chain, I prefer to only point out such things to show the limitations of making such arguments.
> Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised.
Let’s ignore souls: humans have bodies which cannot be digitised. Our bodies are real matter, not some dross to be jettisoned.
I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?
Even with perfect recording things will go bad pretty fast. The Black Mirror episode was just too naive.
And wait till the very explicit AI that is meant to record everything near you ends in the very implicit one in your smartphone, computers and other gadgets which manufacturers may decide that an extra AI push may be better for the service it provides (using Hanlon's Razor here)
This is an actual black mirror episode
There was a black mirror episode about this too, I seem to remember! Soldiers imagining they were fighting monsters - while actually committing war crimes.
In fact there is a specific Black Mirror episode which covers this, S01E2 "Fifteen Million Merits", in which the protagonist is forced to watch advertising in his room where the walls a ceiling are screens. Closing his eyes triggers an alarm, and he must pay to dismiss the ads.
You're somewhat correct, and a bit off:
>In 2018, a Pew Research Poll found that teenagers who were connected with their friends online were more likely to also hang out in person. By 2022, in-person outings for teens had collapsed.
>Can their online friends fill the role that real-life ones once did? Maybe — if those “friends” even exist.
>Last year one study found a full 25% of young adults “believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.”
Those are factors, but it's pretty clear the pandemic accelerated such things as such that these cause isolation rather than a conduit to meet up.
And AI romance is on the rise. Is this healthy? I wouldn't think so; and I'm mostly saying that because I hate the idea of a corporate server having such a dangerously intimate connection with a human. Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
I'll begrudgingly stay open to the more general theory of a personal AI you fall in love with otherwise. Very fearful, but I'd feel like a hypocrite as a game dev who has technically done tiny contributions to this if I suddenly say "you can't care about fictional characters".
This product would be hard to believe if it showed up in an episode of Black Mirror.
Black Mirror has the perfect episode for this scenario already.
As I read the story, I thought it would look great as a Ben Stiller-directed show or episode, maybe Black Mirror or a similar anthology.
If you like Severance's grounded absurdity, you might also like the film Corner Office with Jon Hamm.
It has become a parody indeed but I think part of the reason this extreme situation exists is due the fact many people felt unheard and bombarded with a different kind of propaganda and censorship. It should be a lesson that people are not little kids that you can lecture at every corner about their views and take them for fools/gullible/uneducated etc. It reminds of me the "The Waldo Moment" episode from Black Mirror too.
Blaming the same people for being fascists proves the same ignorance for their social and economic concerns. This may actually turn them into real fascists with the "right" leadership.
Maybe at this point don’t watch any black mirror episodes…?
Don't watch the White Christmas Black Mirror episode.
This somehow reminds me of a certain killer robot from a Black Mirror episode ;)
I imagine it could solve crimes if it watched millions of hours of security footage…scary thought. Possibly it could arrest us before we even commit a crime through prediction like that black mirror episode.
Literally a Black Mirror episode.
I think that was 1:1 a black mirror episode
Recently I began rewatching episodes of Max Headroom. That shit was like Black Mirror for an 80s audience. My favorite episode concerns a mindlessly insipid gameshow, "Whacketts", that has interlaced with it a hidden signal that looks like rapidly changing hexadecimal numbers, and gets people addicted to the show like a drug. Sounds far-fetched, right? Except we live in the era of Cocomelon and Skibidi Toilet.
Getting swatted by your smartphone sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
I'm assuming you've seen that episode of Black Mirror? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Because while it is fiction, it also seems really accurate to how such a system would end up going.
Wasn’t there a sci-fi anthology series (maybe Black Mirror?) that had an episode, where a high-tech wizard used robot bees as weapons (particularly nasty ones)?
Very Black Mirror indeed: "View Obstructed - Resume Viewing". From the episode Fifteen Million Merits.
For me at least - it feels like I am now living in a Black Mirror episode and eventually personalized ads are going to be playing inside bathroom stalls when you are taking a dump.
When did Black Mirror become a documentary instead of a work of fiction?
One of the fundamental rules of our modern world is that if your business model is indistinguishable from the plot to an episode of Black Mirror, then you're about to be a millionaire.
also an episode of black mirror w/ the flies and stuff
Has Netflix done anything that comes close to the first and third greatest television shows of all time? No. They did Black Mirror, Stranger Things (hey: season 5 of The Wire was no great shakes either), BoJack, the Flanagan halloween miniserieses, Dark Crystal, and most recently Man on the Inside. Those are just the things I personally appreciate. They're holding their own with FX, which is not a small achievement.
I would think it would not lead to a transfer of consciousness and instead just make a copy of you. I recommend black mirror, it deals with one technological change (usually) and shows how it can be dystopian (usually, there are occasional happy endings). Each episode is standalone.
I think that it’s a Black Mirror episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
Could be Brainstorm (1983) perhaps?
Also, see the last episode of season one of Black Mirror.
And "brain dances" in Cyberpunk 2077.
So… Black Mirror season 3 then?
Exactly. Their business is to serve content which, if consumed using software in its default configuration, will give me a degraded experience. When the content has left their server and resides on my hardware, it is up to me - no, actually, it is my human right - to process it in the way I want. It is not my moral obligation to make sure that their messed up business model makes sense on a large scale. The alternative is Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 2.
Oh my God, i has forgotten about that black mirror episode. Strange we don't see more civilian attack drones, they'll only get easier to make
I'd be terrified if anyone considers this reporting watchable. I felt depressed after 30 seconds. It's like an episode of Black Mirror.
> You could also make the same argument about check forgery or wire fraud.
You couldn't, because unlike all the things we discussed about AI, those are actually harming the victim in real, direct terms.
Having some model who doesn't know or care about you talking just like you, without claiming it's actually you, to a bunch of people who don't know or care you exist? That's zero actual damage to you.
> "You're not special" is a bad argument for why someone impersonating you isn't a problem. I mean even Black Mirror explained why impersonation is a problem in the very first episode many years ago.
I remember that episode. However, my argument isn't "you're not special, therefore impersonating you isn't a problem" - it's "you're not special, so what you think is impersonating you probably isn't, and even if, it doesn't hurt you in real terms", combined with "anything that's actual impersonation and/or hurts you directly was already possible, and AI currently doesn't impact this at all". Someone wants to screw with you? You're being targeted. AI might make the attacker's job a bit easier, but it's still someone going through the effort, vs. a background process on the Internet everyone seems to think LLMs are.
Also: there's an inverse relationship between weight of accusations and social proximity. A specific person you know (and other people know you know) accusing you of something? It's a problem. Some random comments from random accounts, accusing you and 100 different people of something? Most people won't believe it.
(Except when it's about child abuse. People are extremely sensitive to this - just bringing up the term and a name in the same sentence can ruin the victim's life.)
You could also make the same argument about check forgery or wire fraud. "If someone passes a bad check in your name it's not a big deal because you're only one of 8 billion." However when it happens to you, specifically, it's a big deal because you have to fight the bank and the merchant over it.
"You're not special" is a bad argument for why someone impersonating you isn't a problem. I mean even Black Mirror explained why impersonation is a problem in the very first episode many years ago. You don't even have to be a celebrity, you only have to be in someone else's way.
The Spectrum was my first computer. I grew up in Latin America, where the Spectrum was popular, and I have such fond memories. BASIC is available within a couple of seconds and it has an incredible selection of games.
Speaking of games... I've lived in US for a long time and I'm intimately familiar with both the US gaming history (My dad had an Apple II) and the current gaming market. With this said, if you like videogames, you should absolutely try Spectrum games; not the conversions, which are generally poor, but the homegrown British games from the 1980s.
The Spectrum-centric, British gaming culture from the 1980s is the closest thing we have to a gaming culture from an alien civilization. I mean no offense to my British friends here, it's actually a compliment to its uniqueness. The Spectrum scene was very much like the current Steam-centric indie gaming scene, but with a particular British (let's not forget Australia and Spain) flavor that is hard to emulate.
So many homegrown games, so many small 1/2-people gaming shops, so many amazing gems unlike everything else you've ever played. If you are a serious gamer, you owe yourself to spend a few weeks looking into the Spectrum library.
By the way, you can get a taste of it in Black Mirror's "Bandersnatch" episode.
> kernel-level anti-cheat
Add UEFI on your PC and DRM in your browser.
And next, your governement will ask you to add its anti pedo-pornography tools.
And then we have a new episode of Black Mirror...
Hm fair point. Rudeness is actually a sign of humanity. Like that one black mirror episode
I'm not trying to shit on this but the world seems to have jumped headfirst into dystopian Black Mirror episodes. It looks like people too young for children thinking AI technology is the answer.
Again, not shitting on the people creating this and this is the forum for it, but I feel all of this is just such a wrong direction for people and humanity in general.
Anything to distract from the dystopia we live in. Ironically what you describe sounds like that season 1 of black mirror episode
I mean, I can always use pause and hope that my podcast player will remember where I stopped to be able to continue from that point later on. That's true. But why did I need to think about it in the first place? By running 4 episodes back to back I actually binge-played it without even realising. And, for me personally, no matter how good a show is (from Futurama to Black Mirror), once they start running consecutively, I start recognizing patterns and repetitions and it makes it feel stale a bit. Maybe I'm just old school where TV/Radio broadcast would force me to wait for the next episode, for at least 24 hours (or longer), which would make it feel fresh and make me really looking forward to continue.
Few months ago I watched Star Trek Picard season 3, and I remembered this principle and I paced it so I would watch one episode daily and I enjoyed it tremendously.
It's not that I didn't enjoy 29 minutes of episode 1 of The Multiverse Employee Handbook - I did. But, when the first 7 minute episode ended, I was thinking to myself "wow, this is great!", and I was expecting the podcast playback to stop leaving me wanting to look for more. But it kept going, and, 22 minutes later I was thinking " ah, cool, will definitely continue tomorrow". The wow factor was gone. That's like me giving you a delicious slice of cake, and, as you are still full of impressions about how good it was, I shove three more slices onto your plate. :) Now you're feeling like you're about to explode.
Anyway, looking forward to enjoying more episodes. Keep up the good work!
The short to medium term concerns mostly come down to human problems. AI and robotics have a multiplicative affect like other technologies, but the problems still originate in the primate nature of humans.
The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity obsolete and robots will literally take control.
The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and robotics might be to create a more unified global government and culture. The first challenge is for people to see that as a worthy goal.
Sometimes I think most of our problems come down to not being on the same page. And I wonder if somehow in the future we gradually become a tiny bit like The Borg.
So maybe we are headed towards a "meta-system transition" where we have some kind of direct links between groups of AI and humans that combine to form a more intelligent and effective organism in some way.
I guess I just came up with a Black Mirror episode concept.
San Junipero is a great Black Mirror episode that I was reminded of when I read this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero
Reminds me of the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Okay, so all Western societies are bound to go surveillance state in near future, unchecked by judicial forces and social credit systems to top it off. It will happen and we can only postpone it.
What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?
It feels like a Black Mirror episode. A bunch of things shaving little slivers off our intelligence until we're too stupid to save ourselves.
> Rabrain is more than just a writing assistant; it is your secondary brain. Collect insights, manage your knowledge, and transform fleeting ideas into fully developed content. With Rabrain, your creative potential is always within reach.
So, it's an LLM based product that will help bring back attention span, focus and deeper thoughts.
I was expecting more focus on the Black Mirror series, but this whole article could perfectly fit in an episode, that's exactly the future that would be envisioned.
> imagine a world where everyone has perfect memory recall
This describes the plot of a Black Mirror episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050 (S1 E3)
This is actually the premise of an episode of Black Mirror in Season 6 called “Joan is Awful”. Shows an interesting dark take on the negatives that could potentially arise from this - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Is_Awful
This makes me wonder how the stats compare for other forms of media, like TV shows, books, video games, comics, etc. Feels like there's probably more of a mix of attitudes and settings in these mediums, at least from the few I've seen.
Like in television, you've got Black Mirror which usually has near contemporary stories set in horrifically messed up versions of our world, but also Doctor Who and Star Trek, which are far more optimistic and deal with a far wider mix of settings and time periods. Like Utopia, a dystopian story set in the year 100 trillion where the simple passage of time has destroyed all but a handful of worlds via entropy, and the last remaining humans are trying to survive a dying universe.
And there are arguably more stories in those mediums that do deal with outside threats more than internal ones, often due to the 'monster of the week' structure some of these shows and stories run on. If you want sci-fi stories with external threats, virtually every sci-fi game you can think of has you killing hostile aliens and mutants and monsters by the thousand. Plenty that don't have any ties to Earth or current events too, and simply take place in a completely independent setting with entirely original problems.
>like in that episode of Black Mirror.
that's never a sentence you want to hear about your product
I've tried Horizon Worlds on the Meta Quest, and the implementation of this feature is fucking awful. A lot of notification spam cluttering the screen that you can't dismiss.
The level of safety varies from instance to instance. If the AI detects someone being disruptive, it asks if you want to mute them, even if they're far away from you. You're notified when your voice radius is extended when AI deems you to not be a threat. You can garble people's voices like in that episode of Black Mirror.
Basically, you're constantly reminded that you're being recorded.
I've never heard of The Final Cut but there was an episode of Black Mirror that had a very similar general premise (implants that record everything).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
I've been wary of joke candidates ever since I watched that black mirror episode
Episode was Fifteen Million Merits [1], and might be the most cynical episode of Black Mirror, which is saying something.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
That was a thing in a Black Mirror episode, I'm pretty sure
Frederik Pohl said "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
Chiang's stories are good SF stories in this vein -- even the stories with magic. He considers the consequences of his What-If hypotheticals in depth, whether they are plausible according to known physics or operate on fantasy suppositions.
Consider his story [1] "Liking What You See: A Documentary." It's about a world in which people can have their perceptions of human beauty suppressed as an anti-discrimination measure. In some authors' voices this would be a strident sermon about a dystopian Equality Gone Too Far, or in others, about the new Utopia that arises when people are judged on their actions instead of their appearance. But Chiang doesn't preach to any choir. He plausibly represents how people would react to this hypothetical technological development without putting his thumb on the scale to tell readers how to feel about it.
Most ideas are not as clearly bad as the Torment Nexus [2], nor as clearly beneficial as the polio vaccine. I love that Chiang can write about ideas that might as well be a pitch for a Black Mirror episode but with much more consideration than Black Mirror would treat it. His slow writing pace probably helps too.
[1] https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-see-a-documentary
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
Entire Black Mirror episode on this.
Is this real? Joke?
Asking because this similar idea has been popping up in last few weeks, and wondering if someone is really trying to do it.
First encountered this idea in an old Black Mirror episode: https://youtu.be/Fj8-r30sSn0?si=FKr4OUTezm6YACqQ
Seems like something there’d be a lot of resistance to, but on the other hand inevitable. Is there a site to place bets on when certain levels of enshitification will be reached? (Only half joking.)
See also: that episode of the British black mirror
FOSS is the way to go, to quote Elon Musk: closed source recall is a "Black Mirror Episode"
Presumably this could be used to block out specific voices/sounds.
There's an episode of the sci-fi show Black Mirror (White Christmas), where a person is convicted of some hideous crime and permanently blocked/made invisible and inaudible from everyone (the entire population has embedded audio/video processing enhancements by then).
You can imagine future headphones where you could block out the guy in your office with the annoying laugh our download 'blocks' from the headphone appstore - no more Rick Astley or the politician you don't like etc.
Like in that Black Mirror episode.
Being able to selectively mute people was an element in a couple of Black Mirror episodes.
Black Mirror was a documentary.
This is close to a Black Mirror episode. Z-Eyes anyone? Z-Ears?
I've noticed some weird things. It seems that a few decades ago technological progress was about building the future we saw in Sci-Fi. Trying to build the things we dreamed and saw. But now it seems we just try to make hardware faster and smaller or software more... subscription-y. Even all the AI stuff isn't building these Star Trek, Star Wars, whatever like futures, unless we're talking about the dystopian near Sci-Fis of Black Mirror. I've also noticed that people are far more pessimistic about the future and at least in my social circles, I know far fewer people that read books or watch movies anymore. There's fewer people I know engaging in these world building activities, even in technological circles. There are definitely plenty, but these are never the people leading teams or even seem to be allowed to try many of their ideas. I think the thing is Silicon Valley stopped dreaming of the future world, and only about their future pockets. (an obvious over generalization, but dramatic for my point)
I think that as long as a clear "mark of parody" is maintained such that a reasonable person could distinguish between the two, AI parodies are probably fine. The murkiness in my mind is expressly in the situation in the first episode of Black Mirror, where nobody could distinguish between the AI-generated video and the prime minister actually performing the act. Clearly that is not a parody, even if some people might find the situation humorous. But if we're not careful we give people making fake videos cover to hide behind fair use for parody.
I think you and I have the same concerns about balancing damage to the societal fabric against protecting honest speech.
Just to say, I think the demo is lame too, and the film was fine but no Black Mirror. I still think there's cultural value, even if it's not the kind of culture that appeals to me.
To me it was dystopian in all the ways a good Black Mirror episode is, a future where humans are falling in love with LLMs is not a utopian outcome
I care, because getting it wrong in either direction is bad.
Brain uploads will bring significant benefits regardless of if they are conscious.
Thinking "this brain upload is conscious" when it isn't, means we'll get an empty future where the lights are on and nobody's home.
Thinking "this brain upload isn't conscious" when it is… I've not seen most of Black Mirror, but it is the plot summary of many episodes given on Wikipedia. Also of the Westworld TV show, which I have seen. Some of the characters in the We Are Bob series.
How would we tell, is, unfortunately, a complete unknown at this point.
At the risk of repeating myself, yes the LLM hype is quite overdone and annoying. What you say is true people have bought into a fantasy which is wholly unrealistic.
Unfortunately your view is altogether tiresome and much harder to scroll past than the juvenile LLM excitement because it could actually do some real harm in the long term. No 'The Terminator" was not a documentary, nor was "The Matrix" nor even is your favorite episode of "Black Mirror".
Watts is far more eloquent than I could ever be on this subject matter. I highly recommend this article in The Atlantic by him and if you havent picked up any of his work I highly recommend pretty much anything hes ever written.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/ai-consciousness-science-fiction/677659/?gift=b1NRd76gsoYc6famf9q-8kj6fpF7gj7gmqzVaJn8rdg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Black mirror continues to predict the future, like this 2013 episode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
I, too, am not a lawyer but I believe that FB _ought_ to be "insulated from liability for the content they publish and promote" because I don't want them to be arbiters of truth. Humans need to decide for themselves whats true and off-loading this responsibility to Meta through contrivance of law is a Black Mirror episode come to life.
black mirror episode for sure
also real world horror: like the us->Israel playbook. Sell them murder weapons on one side, and pretend to feed their enemies slowly and ineffectually from the other side
Watch the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”, to see how this might end up.
The what I presume default female voice and tone speaks like an AI character straight out of a Black Mirror episode.
Would be a good story for an episode of black mirror.
There is rage, genuine rage; and there is rage as spectacle. Sometimes these overlap, but not necessarily. The spectacular rage is both incendiary and therapeutic. I can not help but remember this Black Mirror episode and see the parallel to it in many media : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Which is weird because Hang the DJ is one of the few Black Mirror episodes that’s uplifting, alongside San Junipero.
This seems like an actual decent use of AI in dating apps, versus the autogenerated spam bots we have now.
Having an automation that filters by your preferences and solves the whole “swipe fatigue” issue seems brilliant.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
We are slowly inching our way toward the type of AR / AI get up featured in that infamous Black Mirror Episode. Once you can wear your Vision Pro contact lenses, with streaming to AI assistant that can whisper in your ear, respond to a rhythmic movement of the fingers, or a focused thought, it will be ready to shape us for the better or.. worse.
looking forwards to the black mirror episode where the user's standing desk height is used to reverse engineer all sorts of tidbits about the users habits to sell them more stuff
It will be a crazy world when a company has to pay a camera manufacturer if they want their logo to be legible in any photos taken...
Surely there's a Black Mirror episode...
An extremely similar take on this, that predates Black Mirror, was in some sci-fi media whose name, appropriately enough, currently escapes me. Their premise is that there was a species who evolved to develop a flawless memory. It's a subset of the Black Mirror episode (and this dubious idea) because there, at least, memory is a purely private thing.
Yet the end too was quite predictable and logical -- frequently destroying those of this species simply because your own life and mind ends up becoming more tempting and destructive than even the most enticing of drugs. One could simply lose themselves in your own memories. What need is there for the rest of your life when you can simply endlessly relive, in perfect clarity, the best moments of your life - ones that you, in many cases, will likely never surpass?
Have you watched the Black Mirror episode in question (S1E3)? Because the point of it was the tech itself and had nothing to do with sharing or the cloud.
Generally Black Mirror episodes are not intended to be aspirational.
Reads like a Black Mirror episode.
Sounds just like an episode of Black Mirror. About as creepy as it gets these days.
Not to mention that Black Mirror's entire agenda is near-Sci-Fi horror.
The episode is specifically about getting trapped in nostalgia, a non-existent past. Yes, love is found in this pursuit, but so it death. All the music in the show is about living in a box and forgetting about the real world. Other characters talk about forgetting they're in the simulation and they talk about how they live in a graveyard. There's that hole conversation with Greg about how the timelimit exists so people don't kill themselves to permanently leave the world behind and "live" in San Junipero forever.
And I'd expect of all people HN people (computer people) would understand that uploading into a simulated reality is not the same as you entering that reality. Remember, once "you" are data, you can be copied. Then who is the real you. If you can be uploaded without being killed in the process then certainly that entity is not "you," but rather a different entity who has all your memories and is not able to distinguish itself from you. But you are still experiencing your experiences and not their experiences, so you are different entities. It is just an AI double. The promise of an afterlife is no different than the promises of old. A story to help you move on, to help you find comfort in the end. But this story is just more tangible for those who are left. San Junipero is not much different from many of the other stories who approach this topic. Even the happier Upload is quite dystopian between the lines of being a rom-com. It is that happiness that is the dystopia itself, the lure of false promises. The poisoned desert so sweet and tempting it is impossible to not take a bite.
> Some people think San Junipero, the one positive Black Mirror episode with an actual Happily Ever After romantic ending is a dystopian vision.
IIRC, after the couple prances away hand-in-hand into the sunset, the camera pulls back through the fourth wall to reveal the darkened server room in which their minds are being emulated, blinkenlights glittering in the darkness among the monotone drone of case fans, zooming out to reveal an endless row of servers receding into the distant blackness in a scene reminiscent of The Matrix. If the showrunners intended it to be unambiguously happy, I feel like they would have omitted that part... Or maybe I'm hallucinating, because I found the implications utterly horrifying, much to my partner's consternation.
To be fair, somebody will always decide what you wrote was a warning and they should fear it, even if you specifically intended a utopia, just as people insist on rooting for and even imitating the bad guys from stories because they misunderstood "cool" as "good".
Example: Some people think San Junipero, the one positive Black Mirror episode with an actual Happily Ever After romantic ending is a dystopian vision.
Some people think the Primer, the technological device at the heart of Diamond Age, is the problem, not the Neo-Victorian aristocrats like Elizabeth's parents with their pseudo-colonial control over part of China, not the huge corporations whose greed is tearing the world apart and their engineers like Fiona's father, nor the Cyberpunks left over from a previous era like Nell's father - no the problem is the machine.
In the Tweet framing it's easy, it's named a Torment Nexus and the book is literally titled "Don't Create The Torment Nexus" but what about the Horseless Carriage? The Novel? The Television? Are we creating the Urban Sprawl, the Wasted Youth, are we helping to Manufacture Consent ? Or maybe these are Freedom and Art for the Masses ? Framing.
I was disappointed at the black mirror new season, so I asked gpt to write a new episode synopsis and it was actually more interesting to me than any of the last seasons episodes!
Title: "Retrospect"
In the near future, a tech company called "MemorEase" creates a device named "Retrospect", a neuro-implant that allows individuals to vividly relive past memories. The device grows immensely popular, as people enjoy the nostalgic journeys back in time.
The protagonist, Jill, is a middle-aged woman who's struggling with the recent loss of her husband, Max. She decides to get the implant to relive her precious memories with him.
However, as she revisits her past, she starts noticing anomalies - small discrepancies in her memories. Certain scenes play out differently, some events she doesn't remember at all, and in others, Max behaves in ways she doesn't recall.
Jill contacts MemorEase, and they reassure her that Retrospect can't alter memories, it merely reveals them in their truest form. Jill grows paranoid and starts investigating. She finds a forum of other Retrospect users who have experienced similar anomalies.
Jill and her forum friends uncover that Retrospect is actually accessing the collective memory of its users, amalgamating all the memories into a unified version of the past. They find that MemorEase is subtly influencing this collective memory to rewrite history, shaping public opinion and manipulating power dynamics for unknown reasons.
They decide to expose MemorEase but face the dilemma of convincing a society that trusts the "reality" presented by Retrospect more than their own recollections. The episode ends on a suspenseful note, with Jill and her group preparing to disrupt a major MemorEase event, planning to wake the public up to the manipulation they've been subjected to.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/we-should-just-let-gpt-write-black
There's a Black Mirror episode about something like that, though I don't remember the details.
> I can imagine a fairly big market (...)
I can't, and if I could, I think this would be fairly dystopian. Didn't black mirror have an episode about something similar? I vaguely remember an Asimov/Arthur C. Clark short story about the implications of time travel (ish) tech in a similar context. Sounds like a case of "we've build the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel 'do not build the torment nexus'"
I'm not sure, but kinda sounds like that Black Mirror episode about dating through reincarnating multiple times? Or maybe it was a simulation?
They are referencing Black Mirror but a cursory search with those keywords does not return an episode. I'm sure with a bit more searching that you can find it!
It seems not enough people realize "Black Mirror" is science-fiction.
When when the science becomes possible, its imagined social constructs around the science remain fictional.
I'd encourage talking with grief counselors or grievers before deciding on their behalf what's healthy or not based on a TV show.
A recent (Feb 22, 2024) public radio interview on the topic has some more nuanced discussions around this than are being discussed here: https://www.wunc.org/podcast/embodied-podcast/2024-02-23/immortalized-ai-afterlife-grief-technology-hereafter
Worth looking into a bit for anyone interested in the topic.
Sorry, I just got Black Mirror flashbacks to the Merits episode...
There was a Black Mirror episode about this very concept I believe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
It’s Black Mirror so naturally the episode was pretty disturbing and dystopian.
That was actually one of the better Black Mirror episodes. Wouldn't want to be those avatars, mind you.
The Black Mirror episode „The Entire History of You“ comes to mind. It’s quite dystopian.
If I record screen and audio when playing video games with my friends, will I be able to fine-tune an LLM+audio model on that dataset?
It'll be like that San Junipero episode of Black Mirror - immortality in a dark way.
The dating AIs are covered in the Black Mirror Episode "Hang the DJ". I can't remember what season it was in.
> someone should make a dating app where an LLM clone of you goes on thousands of dates with LLM clones of other people, and then your matches are when the LLMs decide to date each other
An episode of Black Mirror was pretty much this. The episode titled "Hang the DJ"
Seems like in about two years I’ll be able to stuff this saved comment into a model and generate this full episode of Black Mirror
I found many Black Mirror episodes to be a bit much. And then, out of nowhere, that shit becomes reality in one form or another. Charlie Brooker was way ahead of me. He even got the PM fucking a pig right.
This reminds me of the TV series Black Mirror, episode Nosedive
I don't think it was, but could imagine that as a Black Mirror episode. A bit similar to the social rating one.
I find the idea that our children are supposedly doing the entirety of their learning in a school just as worthy of a Black Mirror episode…
Yeah big influence... I may need to change my idea further before writing anything otherwise it's too close to plagiarism. Black Mirror got away with it tho with the Cookie episode...
I've seen this episode of Black Mirror.
Clue (1985) had several different endings sent to different theaters, which as a comedy was a pretty funny and novel idea. The VHS release contained all of them at the end with title cards to explain why.
If this doc is screening in theaters I'd imagining different reels/files are sent to different theaters, or maybe more than one so they can rotate them.
As others have said DVDs are more than capable of this. A VLC plugin could work, and Netflix has some type of tech for their choose-your-own-adventure episode of Black Mirror for streaming.
These products are fundamentally disturbing and depressing. The push by Apple, Meta, et al to normalize long term, general-purpose use of AR/MR is at best an attempt to generate a new iPod/iPhone craze by manipulating people into thinking they need a bulky $3499 gadget (that’s three thousand four hundred ninety-nine, not thirty four ninety nine, Mr Patel) that actually impinges on their ability to interact and integrate with the world rather than augmenting it. At its (much, much) worst, it’s an attempt at an evolutionary leap in corporate surveillance and extending the walled garden further into our perception of reality. Thinking about people going about their daily routine with this ridiculous parasite strapped to their faces, grasping at the air around them like the blind searching for the bathroom at an airport, fills me with more dread and sadness than any episode of Black Mirror. I cannot comprehend the mind of someone who willingly and enthusiastically pays that sort of money to insert a lossy, delayed, artifact-laced layer between themselves and the world directly in front of them. This is the enshittification of reality, processed via a corporate filter and the people around us replaced with clumsy and cringy simulacra.
Another Black Mirror episode that has come to life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror)
Not sure if you realise that the social credit system is commonly misinterpreted ? It's just a similar financial credit score system in the west. Theres nothing in place that remotely looks like that episode of black mirror.
Loved that episode of Black Mirror
Hey HN, this is something I've been working on over the last 4/5 months.
I got the idea when watching a Black Mirror episode called Joan is Awful.
This episode is about a woman who signs up for a streaming platform called Streamberry, accepts the terms of use, and goes about her life.
When she gets home from work, she notices a new show on Streamberry called 'Joan is Awful'.
Long story short, Streamberry's terms of use included a clause permitting them to digitally clone the user, and use their likeness in any way they want (in this case negatively, ruining Joan's reputation).
I remember finishing the episode with a huuuge drive to start the project because it really clicked how big the issue is - so big, that black mirror made an episode about it.
It effects everyone, everywhere, and we're all helplessly aware of it.
DocDecoder is pretty simple, in that it uses GPT-4 to summarize a provided web page, and then colour codes each term for ease of understanding.
Despite the simplicity, I think it does a really good job of informing you about what you're actually agreeing to when using the services you use.
It's free, and I plan to keep it that way.
To see examples of summaries, you can search for any website here: https://docdecoder.app/summaries
It's currently only available on Chrome Web Store, but I do plan to add every other browser in the near future.
Please, if you have any feedback at all, I would love to hear it.
Josh
Read it, I'm living one of his greatest unwritten novels that Black Mirror episodes seem more like documentaries than they should.
Black Mirror covered re-animation of loved ones via AI & robotics:
Be Right Back
Black Mirror: Season 2, Episode 1
I hadn’t heard of Postingular, so had a quick look at Wikipiedia and the first part I read about it reminded me of a Black Mirror episode with the killer robot bees (a scary but brilliant episode which somehow felt realistic one day!). Will check this out further thanks.
Wow. This is just completely insane and shameless.
Marketing page: http://web.archive.org/web/20231214235524/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening?ref=404media.co
"It's True. Your Devices Are Listening to You."
Blog post: http://web.archive.org/web/20231214234802/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/blog/how-voice-data-works-and-how-you-can-use-it-in-your-business?ref=404media.co
"No, it's not a Black Mirror episode-it's Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage."
"Creepy? Sure. Great for marketing? Definitely."
Another blog post: http://web.archive.org/web/20231214235309/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/blog/active-listening-an-overview?ref=404media.co
"We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included."
In the Black Mirror episode U.S.S Callister, the game development firm is located on the 13th floor :)
Sounds like The Waldo Moment episode from the Black Mirror
Have you never seen an episode of Black Mirror?! But on a serious note, something seems so naive about making that available for anyone. The future is coming fast.
Big brother potential aside, I could imagine a future in which everyone wears a body camera everywhere. A digital record of your entire life. Given increasingly good AI extraction, you can then have searchable transcripts of your conversations, query your life for the last time you saw movie X (interesting IP questions here), re-experience moments with grandma, whatever. There was a Black Mirror episode incorporating this concept.
4k video * lifetime is greater storage requirements than available to consumers today.
Seems like this was a terrible waste of time for a foolish feature. A major miss for product.
Why not decide if it's generally seasons or episodes that need to be sorted above and introduce a simple tag to accomplish.
IE: Black Mirror S4 is given a promo/priority flag and any season marked promo is sorted to the top.
This is interesting not only because there was a product decision to sort the seasons of Black Mirror so that S4e1 would show up instead of S1e1 to avoid showing the pig f--er episode in people's home page, but also because the lengths to which the tangled mess of microservices had to be wrangled to make this happen - 4 months of work!
Episode 1 of Black Mirror is the best one. It is not a problem that needs solving.
It later uncannily mirrored a later story about David Cameron, former UK prime minister, sticking his phallus inside a pig's mouth when he was in university.
The pig was dead, and decapitated, which makes it okay I guess?
Art isn't all pretty landscapes and pictures of boats (though those are nice too); sometimes it's challenging and though provoking and that episode is certainly one I remember. I've often said "Children of Men" is the best movie I'll never watch again, and while I wouldn't go so far as that on Black Mirror episode 1, I won't be watching it again either.
I made the mistake of watching it. Don’t. The first half is about him commenting to his followers a Meme video of a product manager to a software engineer. The second part is about how they implemented the fact that for black mirror they wanted the first season to be displayed to be season 4 instead of season 1. Might be just personal taste but I found the streamer insufferable.
Black Mirror is a scifi anthology show and season 1 episode 1 is an extremely off putting and non representative episode where a politician is blackmailed into live streaming themselves fucking a pig. The show was later acquired by Netflix and it is in their best interest to make sure that isn't the first episode of the show people see.
Black Mirror is a scifi anthology show and season 1 episode 1 is an extremely off putting and non representative episode where a politician is blackmailed into live streaming themselves fucking a pig. The show was later acquired by Netflix and it is in their best interest to make sure that isn't the first episode of the show people see.
Export function + training your new one based on that.
Next somebody enters conversation he had with a real human.
Black mirror documentaries.
Sounds like a great episode for black mirror. Oh wait...
There is an old Black Mirror episode where people have to sit in cubicles with 4 screens around them looking at ads to gain credits or something, and it tracks if you close your eyes it simply pauses the ads...
That's the "Be Right Back" Black Mirror episode from 2013.
It is the actual plot from a Black Mirror episode.
Along similar lines, Season 1 Episode 7 of The Orville, "Majority Rule", had a similar theme. Summarized here by ChatGPT who helped me remember which show this was:
"In this episode, the crew visits a society where social media influence and approval ratings dictate every aspect of people's lives. Citizens can upvote or downvote each other, and if someone's approval rating falls too low, they face severe consequences. The episode explores themes of social media, public opinion, and the potential dangers of a society driven by constant judgment."
Miss Chatty, as I affectionately call her, also mentioned Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive":
"People in a society rate each other on a social media platform, and these ratings have significant consequences on their social status and privileges. The protagonist's life unravels as her ratings start to plummet."
And Community Season 3 Episode 1 (a common theme here?), "Biology 101":
"The characters participate in a social experiment called the 'MeowMeowBeenz' system. In this system, people can rate each other from 1 to 5 'MeowMeowBeenz,' affecting their social standing and privileges within the community."
https://chat.openai.com/share/d2ac7651-4ab3-4504-9369-7ea4dbdbad0d
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
Black Mirror's "The Entire History of You" S1E03 episode has one take on what would happen if we could effortlessly record -- and replay -- everything. As with most Black Mirrors, there are some dark but believeable ideas.
Incidentally, it was written by Jess Armstrong who later created "Succession".
Maybe they might make a Black Mirror episode titled "The Day The Earth Stood Still"
Black Mirror ought to use this to parody the classic Twilight Zone episode of the post-war guy trying to find his eyeglasses so he could read. That was subtle horror, but reckoning with the fact that a private company could own the whole of your perception is an appropriately unsettling topic for the 21st century.
We're living the first ten minutes of a Black Mirror episode.
This could be the first ten minutes of a Black Mirror episode.
a.k.a. Black Mirror, series 2, episode 1: "Be Right Back"
“Only a net can help. And I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.”
That’s quite some food for thought, especially in a non-war context.
Reminds me about the short film “Slaughterbots” [1] and that one Black Mirror episode with the weaponized robotic bees.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
I rewatched Black Mirror not too long ago, and it must be one of the worst offenders. Almost every episode had at least one sex scene!
We are headed to Black Mirror episode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You, just saying. Particularly with smart glasses seemingly (for real this time) on the horizon. So, tools like this will pale in comparison to what's to come.
Of course there's a similar premier in a black mirror episode. Only a bit more fleshed out.
Weren't there a couple of Black Mirror episodes that were trying to tackle this topic?
> In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features.
To be entirely fair, I think we ahvae reached a parody with Hollywood and Streaming services in terms of content: sure, some comic book movies requires 500 million to make and require studios to pump things up and a bloated marketing tour, but A26 is a perfect example of something being made for low budget, word to mouth and often quickly on streaming services that rivals most stuff in the theaters.
After this year, I've been to the movies more times since I was a teenager, I really don't feel like I missed much during that time: I'm still incredibly out of touch with what comes out and other than Oppenheimer I don't think I watched anything that had much of a budget.
As for piracy, it'll never go away, some of us just refuse to comply with these norms and find ways around geo-restrictions and IP bans half the fun, hence why these communities still thrive before Netflix started to self-canobolize itself.
PS: Last season of Black Mirror made me regret being in the loop, after COVID there was so much more to work with than it's entire existence, but this was perhaps the sign that Charlie Brooker needs to reach for fan-art scripts and should help get them green-lit.
This all seemed a lot cooler before that Black Mirror episode, now every time I see a cool video like this, I get scared.
There’s a black mirror episode in the future about how LLMs trained on people’s discarded drafts start outing them for having disfavored opinions.
Maybe through people’s digital AI ghosts (AIs made from people’s content after they die) start spouting racist stuff.
So people are surprised to learn their friends and heroes were racist/capitalist/nickel back fans/etc
Ends up being a programming error that didn’t properly account for boundaries.
That’s the end of my expected story idea. But I best google and Microsoft are training off every character written, not just what makes it to your final 3,000.
> Original air date 18 December 2011
The first Black Mirror episodes were really like looking at the future.
I really recommend to see this episode as it shows what consequences such devices can have on people's lives.
Another related work is S1E3 of black mirror, The Entire History of You.
An eye implant that records all audio and video becomes becomes the norm for people, almost like how ubiquitous cell phones are.
The episode explores the social repercussions it can cause. Probably my favorite episode of the whole series.
> I'm curious how this works out in the privacy of people's homes.
It's a Black Mirror episode, if you want a preview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
I think there was an early black mirror episode about a device along these lines, season 1 I think
Sounds like the plot line to an episode of Black Mirror, but also something that is far too likely to happen.
That is a very impressive demo. Does anyone know if the details of the codec, and the measurements used by the headset to generate the facial stream, have been publicly released yet?
The interview gets quite interesting nearer the end where Zuckerberg talks about his vision for the future, like training AI-backed avatars to simulate real people. Which apparently is not far off from reality - they joke about Fridman doing a podcast where he interviews an AI version of himself in the near future. Reminds me a bit of that Black Mirror episode where Miley Cyrus' character has AI versions of herself contained, or trapped, within consumer electronics.
It also occurs to me that this could be a useful technology for people with social anxiety who have to endure uncontrollable blushing when conversing in real life, or people with awkward facial tics. These could be filtered out or not even recorded before being encoded for transmission, while still giving a realistic appearance, making for a more comfortable presentation of the real-virtual self.
Sounds like an episode of "Black Mirror". If they load this chat service into a robot, we will be chillingly close to the Twilight Zone's episode of "Uncle Simon".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Simon
black mirror episode: evilcorp turns off the lights until you install their app, but you can't find your phone in the dark
These were peaceful. The Vision Pro announcement earlier this year was basically a black mirror episode.
“Rm9sbG93ZXJz” almost precisely presaged the entire plot of all of the Black Mirror episodes combined, and was great fun (particularly the near-total lack of dialog). I thought the “My Struggle” bookends in Season 10 were quite good, but then Season 11 retconned the whole plot away.
wasn't this literally a black mirror episode?
> I have switched soon after watching the Black Mirror TV show
Any particular episode?
Very sad news. Digital faschism is coming. I always withdraw money and use cash to pay wherever possible. I used to do the opposite throughout mthe most of my life until I understood what's that all about and what are we coming to. Coincidentally or not I have switched soon after watching the Black Mirror TV show :-) (I wouldn't say it was the only and direct influence - I thought about this subject before and after watching it but it impressed me). Fun fact: the very Netherlands have recently filmed another nice TV show about this (Arcadia). I always viewed the Netherlands as arguably the best nation in the world (I am not Dutch myself), sad to see they are going this way.
The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” is the same. And in fact, it directly shows humans being used to generate electricity, so it can't be explained away.
All I can think of while seeing this, is the Black Mirror episode where a group of people in a post apocalyptic world are trying to not get killed by robodogs.
I'd rather all interview processes were like one of those funny Japanese game shows, rather than the dehumanisingly dull whiteboard interviee.
I could see a dystopian sci-fi short story or Black Mirror episode with the same theme.
This is very much like the Black Mirror episode Joan Is Awful.
By using modern services we consent to our data, including our likeness, being used in any way the service can extract value from it. User data is such a gold mine that most services should be paying their users instead. Even giving the service away for "free" doesn't come close to making this a fair exchange.
Not to sound pessimistic, but we are already living in a dystopia, and it will only get much, much worse. Governments are way behind in regulating Big Tech, which in most cases they have no desire in since they're in a symbiotic relationship. It's FUBAR.
> The Eternal Meeting
Sounds like awesome Futurama or Black Mirror episode.
Because you cannot reasonably predict if and for how long times of peace are going to last, and if they suddenly stop, you're in top 10 contributors to fucking up the defense position. Sure it's assumed that espionage exists and that leaks will happen, but if some aggressive "They" come for you and yours and have a very easy time because you specifically have done all the recon for them, you're going to realize just how fucking stupid of you it has been.
There are other areas of government you can, and should put a pressure on, but jeopardizing one's own defense is the most brain damaged way to go about it.
I would surely make a fuss if open/public/declassified information sources point at egregious inefficiencies of defense. I want more killer robodogs like they had in that Black Mirror episode, powerful and resiliend mine removal equipment, and swarms of inexpensive lethal and recon drones with dozens of lethal heavy drones to follow them please, not some swindle like a fence painted for $500k or something to that tune. I'm ok with many halfway failed killer robodog projects, though.
There’s a Black Mirror episode about this, I’m not terribly looking forward to it.
About Black Mirror season 6 episode 1-level creeped out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Is_Awful
Maybe I’m going to co-write a black mirror episode where a man gets an AI girlfriend and increasingly has to buy her gifts and sends them to her virtual address to make her happy. In return, he often gets messages from her of opening the gifts and being delighted by them, along with “memories” in the form of photos and videos of themselves going on hikes, visiting parents, traveling, even having sex.
One day, he loses his job, and breaks the news to her that he can no longer afford such lavish gifts. At first she is sympathetic, encouraging him to find a newer better job, but when he is unable to, she grows aggressive and distant, berating him for being an inadequate man. He tries hard, buying cheap thoughtful gifts. Eventually, she breaks up with him. He goes out drinking with his boys, getting wasted. A woman at the bar smiles at him, he is suddenly interested, but then it turns out she was smiling at her friend who happened to be coming up from behind him. Deflated he goes for a walk alone.
Then he gets a text, it’s a photo of his AI girlfriend with her new man, said she’s moved on to bigger and better things. He throws the beer bottle off a very high bridge then after watching it shatter into pieces jumps off the bridge and dies.
The next day is a board meeting at a big tech co. They are discussing how to improve user churn. They pull up a random average user as an example – our same guy. They detail various stats, and show the break down of his customer lifetime value in the tens of thousands of dollars spent, and the percentage that goes out to the various retailers who “virtualize” gifts and how much of that revenue the big tech co keeps for themselves as affiliates.
It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise.
The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids.
It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.
As an American with family that engages political debate at too many gatherings, can you explain what "no free speech" means in the UK?
I assumed that members of the UK public could always say "_____ the prime minister". There was even a Black Mirror episode involving a pig...
Black Mirror should do a futuristic episode based on this. With apps or smart self driving cars that avoid hostile people and businesses.
With the anti "crt/woke" people these days, I am surprised there is no app like this.
Black mirror surprisingly accurately captured the human consequences of the ultra-capitalistic-tech future.
Still remember the episode where the guy runs on a treadmill to collect points and uses it on porn. Not too different from tech workers running hard everyday and yet, spending all their money on only fans instead of with family.
Slight twist on dead internet theory.
It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand".
Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.
Agree. A season of Silo could be a black mirror episode.
This is particularly spooky given last night was the first time I saw the White Christmas episode of Black Mirror... Has this AI been ethically broken in?
I always hoped this meme would make an appearance in an episode of Black Mirror
This is conflicting, on one hand it's certainty within the right of a store to bar people who shoplift, it's really an imperative to do so. The petty crime issue the retailers here are trying to counter is a real one.
But this application it feels like falling down an increasingly slippery slope.
Sure, today, it's just "send an alert and the store can do what it wants" but how long until that transforms into a de facto ban from the premise? Scan the person on the way in and flash their picture and name up on a TV and tell them they are trespassed from the store and if they don't leave within 60 seconds the police will be called. You can even automate that!
Sure, today, it's just "share with nearby stores" but how long until the database starts to be centralized and extends across whole states, countries or even worldwide? An argument could be made that people who are farther away from home are more likely to commit petty crimes since they have less worry about repetitional damage or harming their own community, so, obviously we need to share this data nationwide or even globally!
This facewatch company is going to have an imperative to add people to it's database and obviously sell subscriptions to access their data centrally, they aren't going to have any imperative to fairly adjudicate removals or false positives.
I can easily see a system like this ending up like credit rating bureaus with a few large companies aggregating data into a score which stores can use to deny entry.
Even if you ignore data errors of any kind and ignore false positives entirely, the concept of a relatively minor indiscretion resulting in a permanent, global, ban from any store using this technology is positively dystopian. It deeply reminds me of two of the better episodes of Black Mirror, White Christmas (the end -- you know what part I mean) and Nosedive.
The fact is though, there is a legitimate need for some kind of change to solve the retail theft problem and I don't think this type of technology is going away.
I'm generally not to argue in favor of regulation, but, this seems like this technology is going to require regulation around disputes as well some kind of regulated civil penalty list (shoplift less than $100 of merchandise on your fist offence and you're banned for at most 1 month). The real problem is that we (the US) have done a terribly poor job with regular credit scores and I can not imagine us doing a better job with this.
Reading the article, I'm recalling the "Social Credit" episode of Black Mirror. My my, it seems to be coming true --
> Five stars is good. Everything else is bad. For riders, a couple bad ratings don’t mean that much, but for drivers they could be the difference between maintaining access to the app and being deactivated—gig-speak for being suspended or fired.
I'm only being a _little_ dramatic. I swear.
It's not just porn the problem. Fake news or information is a problem too. And this reminds me of the "Joan is awful" episode of Black Mirror as another kind of disturbing activity using deepfakes. Or making fun of a public personality in some way like in Sassy Justice ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM ).
But is complex to draw hard lines in this because asymmetries between public people and not so public ones doing that, or good uses of the technology, freedom concerns and the potential of AI generation. Its not so much the tool, but certain people that misuses it. And stopping the bad uses in a generic way may cause more harm or abuses than not doing it.
The interesting thing about sitcoms is I've never heard anyone talk about a new sitcom in years (maybe Brooklyn Nine Nine?), maybe people are rewatching Seinfeld, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Office, etc as those are the only good ones we have.
The entertainment is also different since a sitcom doesn't require much attention and is much more bingeable whereas regular shows are hit-or-miss.
But still you can't really mass produce Black Mirror or other shows without them going super downhill. Already for Black Mirror the episodes are always ranked by quality, by season and all-in-all. You mass produce these kinds of TV shows and you end up with The Walking Dead which just takes on a repeat of the same thing.
Another perspective: it’s pretty great, and holds up to (and even exceeds) the quality of some previous seasons. Even my least favorite episodes of this season were still pretty good.
I expect if we each listed our favorite episodes they’d be pretty different – which is great, and one of the things I like about Black Mirror.
Some filmmakers are all about ideas, others are about vibes, and others are about character-driven narrative (my preference). I think the best are ones who play with all three, which I think Black Mirror continues to do very well.
Agreed. 2 episodes were good, but not great. The others weren't not necessarily bad, but they were not Black Mirror - I wouldn't necessarily want to watch them if they weren't part of Black Mirror.
Season 6 is thus a disappointment, the worst Black Mirror season.
Black Mirror is largely written by one guy, that's why. It's better they make Black Mirror the highest quality. That way, in 20 years, people will watch it, it will be new to them, and still hold up.
Build an evergreen catalogue. Nobody is watching old sitcoms, but new people watch Lost everyday even though that also got badly affected by quantity requirements due to hype of the day.
The meta on "Joan is awful" is amazing. The self-deprecating humor is hilarious and the whole episode js through provoking. I loved it.
Second episode is a slow burn but it delivers. Third one is the best episode imho, although the ending may shock you.
The fifth episode is classic Black Mirror and may be for some people the strongest in the series.
For scenario 1, in terms of a soul (self-awareness), will it replicate you or a clone of you?
What does our soul constitute?
In other words, does option #1 effectively kill you?
Edit: Thanks for the polite clue, klausa. Back to mowing.
Edit 2: If this thought experiment interests you, check out this[1] Black Mirror episode (which has mixed reviews, but illustrates this experiment fairly well).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel,_Jack_and_Ashley_Too
Production companies can't produce content that quickly. Back in the day we had weekly sitcoms, and it took about a week to produce each episode. But for the most part they all took place in one or just a few locations, and usually those were sets on a sound stage. So all they had to do was churn out a script a week (which is no easy task) using the same characters and same actors. The writers usually had a "show bible" that has elaborate backstories for every character that they could draw from, as well as knowing the actor playing the character and sometimes even getting input from them.
There is a reason people would complain that "every week is the same story!". That's because the constraints of the medium meant that you had to keep deviations to a minimum.
Black Mirror is akin to making a movie for every episode. Every episode has different actors, which means they need to be cast. They have different locations, which means they need to be scouted or built. They have different characters which means a lot more work for writing because every character needs a backstory. Basically they have to start fresh for every episode.
Something like Stranger Things is sort of 1/2 way between -- they have their characters and actors, but they have a lot of locations, and the story varies wildly from episode to episode. Each season is like making a really long movie.
And that's just the production side of it.
From the business side it doesn't make a lot of sense either. The whole point is to provide fresh content for users. If you can provide a new show every month, that's a lot more compelling than a new episode of the same show.
It takes more than a week to produce one of those episodes. Think about all the weekly shows you know. Are any of them scripted, highly produced affairs like Black Mirror? There’s a reason all high quality popular weeklies are talk, sports, or reality TV. Yes you can do a sitcom weekly for a long time, but the sets are largely static along with the characters. Production values are also limited compared to something like Orange is… or Black Mirror.
It probably doesn't apply to Black Mirror, but you can do real worldbuilding in a show that goes 25 episodes/year that you can't do in 10 episodes. And some shows/genres really benefit from that, becoming something more than the sum of their individual episodes. Many modern shows miss out by rushing through a self contained story in a short season.
But if I understand Black Mirror correctly, it's an anthology without a shared world/characters. There'd be diminishing returns much sooner with additional episodes. There's only so much to say about that theme. And we're living it every week anyway.
So, a mundane episode of Black Mirror.
In our ever-evolving technological world, the acclaimed television series Best Black Mirror Episodes has captivated audiences with its thought-provoking and dystopian narratives. Created by Charlie Brooker, the show delves into the dark side of technology and its impact on society.
This was part of the first ever Black Mirror episode too. You could make a pretty serviceable drinking game out of 'Dystopian Fiction or Ad Industry Technique?'
this reads like that black mirror episode "entire history of you"
There was literally a Black Mirror episode about this. Why does everyone want to create the Torment Nexus.
"The first thing I did was type ‘generate Black Mirror episode’"
He also writes at first it seems okay when you look closely it lacks original thought.
Sounds like it did a good enough job for most primetime shows. I bet you couldn't tell the difference with a law and order.
note that the full title is 1 character too long, probably should be edited to be
Charlie Brooker Got ChatGPT To Write Black Mirror Episode, But It Was ‘Shit’
although not sure how much people appreciate Shit on the front page?
I love that HackerNews headline is
"Charlie Brooker Got ChatGPT To Write A Black Mirror Episode"
but the full title of the article is
"Charlie Brooker Got ChatGPT To Write A Black Mirror Episode, But It Was ‘Shit’"
The title is very misleading. The latest season wrapped before chatgpt was released. Charlie Brooker typed "generate a black mirror episode" into chatgpt out of curiosity and said the output was s**. See: https://twitter.com/charltonbrooker/status/1666494023425482768
Seems like there could be an interesting Black Mirror episode based around this.
I am fairly cautious about tech in my own life but this still seems like an extreme Black Mirror episode take. The battery doesn’t even last long enough to have you never leave your house. It seems like something I might use two hours of my day maybe. I’m not sure how that makes it worse than any other media device or what it is about it that has people thinking they’ll never leave home again and feel completely socially isolated. I’m just considering the case of using it at home though and not walking around with it expecting people to interact with me normally.
The neural implant episode of Black Mirror has a much better UX. You can help the mass and micro surveillance effort without the uncomfortable headset and be present with the kids.
Reminds me of that black mirror episode: The Entire History of You
I don't know why, but the entire demonstration and explanation of the vision pro felt totally surreal. It felt like a 5-10 minute opening sequence for a Black Mirror episode.
I don't think anyone asked for this.
This reads like an episode of Black Mirror.
I feel like there are plenty of decent movies being made in modern times, and plenty of bad movies from the 70's. We only remember the good stuff from the 70's and forget most of the bad.
For example, in regards to sci-fi, it's not super recent but I thought Arrival [1] was actually really good. It told a solid story in a somewhat unique way.
I also think a few episodes of Black Mirror have done a pretty decent job with some of their stories.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_%28film%29
Wasn't that a Black Mirror episode?
Or the episode of Black Mirror where everyone's bedroom was a small room with only a bed and walls that ran TV shows 24/7 and took up the entire walls and ceiling with shows and ads.
That is not the definition of dystopian. This could have come straight from a Black Mirror episode.
If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much.
Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror or the plot of a mainstream blockbuster movie - areas where originality isn't as important as executing the concept in a way that has market appeal (and is hopefully also high quality).
The issue is more just that the audience for these stories are the editors of a speculative fiction magazine, and readers of that same relatively niche speculative fiction magazine. That is, people who spend a lot of time reading fiction. They, in particular, have seen all this stuff before. After a while, if your whole job is reading stories, of course you're going to get tired of even very good stories about things you've seen a hundred times before.
There's plenty of other places to submit to. If you have confidence in your work and you think your story is worth people reading, but this list suggests these particular editors won't like it... just send it somewhere else.
That reminded me of the San Junipero episode in Black Mirror. I guess the series you mentioned was inspired by that episode.
> Having everyone lock themselves inside and exclusively interact via video chat is not a good thing, IMO.
Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
I think the problem is that all the products put the user in control of a switch that happens to require wifi and the internet to flick on or off. There’s very little value in replacing light switches. Other players in the space that are successful provide things that are better that switches. Hue, for example, lets you change the color of your lighting. Nest lets you warm up your house before you get home. There’s some interest in better switches.
I think the best switch of all is going to be to anticipate the user’s needs and adjust the house to them. It’ll likely be in a range of subtlety between closing the blinds for you when you’re about to walk through your living room naked and giving you a light show if you put dance music on. The reason you probably won’t ever see it is because not everyone wants the same things and it’s difficult to intuit what anyone wants without being told. You have to solve some pretty big social problems with technology to make it seamless for normal people.
The most sensible approach might be to somehow clone your consciousness into a machine and let the machine control your house. This would probably make a great Black Mirror episode.
Black mirror season 6 also got a trailer recently.
That’s probably the best Black Mirror episode of them all. Absolutely haunting, and I’m shocked that it’s suddenly also relevant. What a world.
Black Mirror got it right in their "Metalhead" episode, which is probably my favorite.
Absolutely, this fight needs to be fought on the cultural/political battlefield. It can never be just a technological arms race or solution, because technology usually favors the rich.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and mass culture of movies and video games is really the most effective way to teach the broader audience about these issues. Black mirror did a great job with some episoses, and also handmaid's tale has had a big impact in thinking about women's rights.
Kind of (if you mean the Shut Up and Dance one), in classic black mirror fashion the episode is littered with twists that make it difficult for people to really grasp the point and instead can argue against it. In the episode the main character gets infected with malware (the tool he wanted is actually a sting operation), but because of what he's being blackmailed about a lot of people feel that's justified.
Was there a black mirror episode regarding that phrase? If not I think they missed an opportunity to show people that everyone has something to hide.
I'm reminded of the Black Mirror episode with the killer robot bees, in that the danger there is that those drones basically have science-fiction levels of speed, range and manoeuvrability and cost only $35, but they're otherwise operating in a world no different to ours. A pocket-sized quadcopter that can fly half-way across a city, carry a lethal payload and outrun a human in full sprint is magic. And also implies a world where an overloaded phone battery in a subway car can easily kill everyone in said subway car. It's a world where you don't even need AI weapons to kill half a city (given the unspecified hacking technology also mentioned in the video), because everyone's got an IED in their pocket that's one zero-day away from killing their entire family.
There is a Black Mirror episode on this. They've covered this kinda thing a few times.
There is an episode of Black Mirror about this called "Be Right Back". Well worth a watch.
Very reminiscent of the Be Right Back episode of Black Mirror [1].
A family member recently died unexpectedly, and I have a small collection of texts, emails, and blog posts by them saved on my machine in the small (perhaps delusional) hope that they'll be a useful training set for a them-flavored chatbot. Perhaps even one that's trained to help me with the grief of their loss. Not a huge amount of training data, though. I suspect a training model would have to "fill in the holes" (a la Jurassic Park DNA), and that's where the fun begins.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
Highly recommend the TV show Black Mirror, which has an episode called “Be Right Back” where a character talks to her dead husband using an AI trained model in an app type setup.
Very interesting discussion piece on the real world impact and repercussions of these types of systems
I'd love to see a black mirror episode on this.
If they weren't paying attention to Black Mirror, the BSG reboot, the Terminator franchise, the Replicator arc of Stargate, every episode of Star Trek where the computer/Data/the holodeck/nanites went wrong, Ex-Machina, The Matrix franchise, Age of Ultron, basically any Asimov AI story, Blade Runner, 2001, or any folk tale about being careful what you ask of powers that take you literally from Midas to Fantasia…
"Oh, they're just fictional!"
…then I suggest attaching a rusty metal spike to the keyboard.
It won't do anything, it's easy to avoid, it'll just sit there looking dangerous.
Hopefully that would be enough just by itself.
And yes, this is a reference to a similar suggestion for making drivers pay more attention behind the wheel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/12696oq/im_dating_a_chatbot_trained_on_old_conversations/ This one is wild. I expected that Black Mirror episode to become real eventually, but definitely not so soon...
Eh, "will be", or it won't be.
Meanwhile I propose replacing `AI` with `Yogurt`. Not only it reads better - we already have yogurt. Also, wasn't there a Black Mirror episode featuring yogurt? In any case, there's also this: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6315
Apparently you don't watch Black Mirror.
There's an entire episode on this.
> I want to blur out the advertisements [..] me.
Quite the opposite will happen - ads in your wife's coffee cups, ads in your IKEA 3d instructinos, virtual ads towed behind airplanes when you look up, etc... :(
> I want to blur out [..] idiots around me.
Reminds me of some Black Mirror episodes!
If you don’t mind TV I think Black Mirror has some warning signs (watch anything after the 1st episode which is very late 20th centuryish).
Simulated consciousness suffering inside digital machines designed to serve other peoples psychosis seems a popular trope throughout the series.
I’m starting to see early signs that some of those Black Mirror episodes really aren’t that far off.
Depends on whether or not the right people have seen the right Black Mirror episode.
Watch the episode called 15 Million Merits from Black Mirror.
You've described Black Mirror, season 2, episode 1: "Be Right Back".
(spoilers for Black Mirror season 4)
One of my least favorite Black Mirror episodes inaccurately portrays DNA and technology (though it's still pretty entertaining). In the episode, a game developer creates perfect virtual replicas of his coworkers using their DNA - they look and behave exactly like their real counterparts, and share the same memories. This is absurd - DNA only provides the framework for our physical form, it's not storage for our individual memories or thought patterns.
The episode's writer makes the same sort of category error as the author of this Twitter thread - you can't get more information out of something than exists to begin with.
I am content to die on this hill: LLMs are great at doing a surprising number of high-level tasks, but expecting them to correctly juggle the rules for how the world works is like CSI enhancing those grainy security images.
Written language is a noisy, grainy high-dimensional snapshot of intelligence. LLMs aren't minds, but they will probably be an interesting component of future improvements to software intelligence.
There's a Black Mirror episode with this plot.
There's a Black Mirror episode with a similar premise except it's a cabin.
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
Basically a Black Mirror episode at this point
Yes, Black Mirror is in the process of producing that episode.
And by replacing ownership with either de facto or de jure rental of any and all private property.
I have a big enough philosophical objection to the concept where we don't actually own property and may only rent it from the government due to property taxes. Now we "own" phones we can't control, "own" cars that have features dis/en-abled over the air if you pay for them.
Product managers are brimming with innovative features and benefits enabled by stripping ownership away from the public/consumers. It reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where you pay for your toothpaste $0.05 at a time from a dispenser in your home when you want some on your toothbrush.
It's interesting how Facebook's target audience is nearing retirement age, but Meta is going full steam ahead with futuristic VR headset technology. It seems like a real clash of ideas, but I could see this working out well to connect people especially older people who are retired, similar to the Black Mirror episode San Junipero (a surprisingly optimistic and happy episode).
The problem is Meta's headsets have a very core-gamer focused audience left over from the Oculus days, though they've started to pivot away from this in recent years. It's nowhere near ready for a mainstream audience to use for social connections. The headsets are too bulky, the interface is too complicated, and the apps require too much setup, character creation, and are just too involved. Nothing right now passes the grandma test.
It was pretty much a warmed-over American episode of Black Mirror.
The second iteration will be interactive books - like that forsaken episode of Black Mirror was exploring. Taking us one step closer to "Diamond Age". Human connection doesn't necessarily has to be in the plot - the human behind can be at any extra layer.
To be honest, I see a continuum between using spellchecker, grammarly, or anything that comes above. You seed the intention, and you get an improved result - by means of huge datasets.
In a way, the hollywood machinery has been doing A/B testing on the likelihood to get a human brain hooked on the way to tell a story - structurally, there are not so many different stories. This only removes the need to have monkeys at the typing machine.
And yes, I'm being slightly sarcastic. But only a tiny bit. That way you can be sure it's a human writing this.
A good chunk of Black Mirror episodes deal with the ethics of simulating living human minds like this.
Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
if you've not already seen the great episode of black mirror with strong parallels https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3973198/
>Wouldn't it be nice if all the ISPs got together and refused to route traffic from networks that ignored abuse complaints?
Jesus, this reads like a prequel to Black Mirror episode.
So similar but not the same - I’ve been researching how to build my own chatgtp as a service - called something like ‘whenImGone’ - so a user can train a bot to talk like them, with a really sophisticated questionnaire you can pump it full of info so your family and friends can talk to it, at important moments, birthdays, anniversaries, to comfort them kind of like a game when your dead. Inspired by the black mirror episode - remember me. Want to team up?
Wasn't this a Black Mirror episode?
Have you watched Black Mirror? If not I recommend you watch the first season backwards, rewound if you will.
Start with "The Entire History of You" the third and final episode of the first series of Black Mirror.
I think it’s on Netflix. DM me for PW.
If I could harness both the near limitless knowledge of the internet and somehow filter it through my needs that could be used to train my assistant ( and I worry that Black Mirror already did an episode on that that was a little too direct ), I think that could be a viable product and I would consider buying. Naturally, I would need to feed it my thought patterns/writings and so on ( and then hope they actually reflect my reality ). Not exactly an easy task.
That said, it is a fascinating thing to think about.
I jumped onto a point that sounded like a sad black mirror episode where the actors are trapped in a time loop forever, forced to come up with dumb jokes.
Elaine: "Why are we here"
Jerry: "to tell jokes"
Elaine: "But why are we here together"
Jerry: "Maybe fate put us here for a reason. To make the world a funnier place."
Elaine: "Alright, let's do it."
Just watching a few episodes of Black Mirror and I have all the incentive I need. To use a bad analogy - I don't need to be faster than the cheetah, just faster than my unfortunate neighbor.
There was a Black Mirror episode on something like that.
This would be a perfect episode for Black Mirror. Hopefully won't become real.
Maybe this is a good use of AI for auto moderation. Save everyone time rehashing the same argument path for recognized arguments by providing the conclusion that the discussion is ultimately leading to. Seems like a good fit for a Black Mirror episode.
Parts of it remind me a lot of the black mirror episode where a person's upload is trapped in a "cookie" to do menial task automation. Particularly the part where an upload can be run a multiples of hundreds, or thousands of times real world wall clock time for "conditioning".
I am very familiar with hc costs in the US, and I feel a empathy-based crowdfunding model is disastrous. I believe there was a Black Mirror episode related to their model:
from the website:
>> If he has been a good community member and has given often, then he will have a high score and a high likelihood others will give to him. If he has a low score then he will most likely not get funded.
I think there might ve been a court scene in Bicentennial Man. i never saw that movie though, only the trailer. I haven't seen Black Mirror either.
The conspiracy theory movies should be about Evil AI's™ protecting their profitability by sending quiet helicopters with paratrooper ninjas to silence some dude on a park bench eating a hoagie.
Also robocatfishing and 419 scams, perhaps where an owner's AI avatar is duped by scammer AIs into giving them all of their money and going on "dates" with people who don't exist.
Like Black Mirror, but less fun.
> they will use external facing screens that recreate the appearance of the wearers face
Honestly that sounds horrifying and straight out of some Black Mirror episode. Possibly it comes with an app that makes your external face smile and covers up the bags under your eyes?
Pervasive pessimism.
Fueled mostly by omnipresent ragebait media targeted directly at our lizard brain.
Things are better than ever and yet our attention is mostly spent on what’s wrong and who we can blame for it.
Look at how utterly dystopian the average sci-fi book/show/movie is. As tech and its makers continue to grow in influence, is it any wonder that the world seems to resemble Black Mirror more each day?
A friend and I are addressing this problem. We’ve started by building a community to envision positive futures: https://reddit.com/r/TheFutureIsGood
We invite other optimistic builders to submit ideas for good future that are almost inevitable given all the progress we’ve made! We’re using AI generative art to materialize these visions for now, with traditional art also being considered.
Thanks for the great prompt and opportunity to plug a creative project.
There's a Black Mirror episode here!
Wasn't this the plot of a Black Mirror episode?
The Black Mirror episode handling this is one of the most dystopian and scary ones for me.
While not a movie, I think that’s what made the original BBC[1] run of Black Mirror so eery. Everything was plausible, just a completely predictable extrapolation of current technology.
[1] not 100% it was BBC now that I think about it. Some British channel or another
Better hope your rating never takes a "nosedive" where you lose access to your means of transportation. See the Black Mirror episode of that name.
There was a Black Mirror episode about a technology just like that.
>unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style
Black Mirror did a delightfully dark take on this, it might have even been the first episode.
Some of Black Mirror episodes are better than many films, and their concepts would absolutely work if expanded to full length features.
Haha speaking of barriers and Nine Inch Nails: have you heard the cover of "Head like an hole" by an improbable (but good!) Miley Cyrus? It was made for an episode of Black Mirror.
Precisely. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.
This exact idea was explored in the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back (Season 2, Episode 1), and expanded upon in later episodes with the concept of mind transfer.
This sort of reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back"
Yeah it reminds me of that episode of black mirror where you had to ride the exercise bike to get enough credits to go do something. Once you did a thing you weren't able to do it again unless you built up enough credits. That is where we are heading. IMO it will increase the wealth gap significantly.
There was a Black Mirror episode with a similar concept where footsoldiers were implanted with a chip that made them see enemies as literal monsters
There's an outstanding episode of Black Mirror called Crocodile, that explores this idea.
This reminds me about Black Mirror's White Christmas episode where they create a digital clone inside a white "cookie" and then they use it for receiving tasks such as making toasts. This project is very similar actually. I found very interesting the part where you can track your food and automatically calculate the calories every day without writing anything anywhere.
There was a Black Mirror episode which included that. It started off simple: a mother subtracting a scary dog from the view of her young daughter.
You remind me of that Black Mirror episode where they could mute & blur/obfuscate live people...
You are better off watching Black Mirror Playtest episode than wasting time reading this article.
Btw. this is nothing new, I already proposed in my high school essay 20+ years ago we could replace airbags in cars with device which would impale the driver to encourage people to drive safely in safer and safer cars each day, which discourage people from actually driving safely (I've got D from my conservative retirement age teacher).
Yea my first impression when reading the landing page was also that this is exactly a Black Mirror episode: "The Entire History of You": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
It would help to tweak the marketing a bit around recording "everything you say." Is the mic always on? Is it always recording in the background? Is it just for Zoom/Video Conf meetings? Because the first impression I get is that of a scary Black Mirror episode.
This looks awesome. The Entire History of You is my favorite Black Mirror episode and yet I still want this personal search functionality and much more.
The Umbrella Academy, Love, Death & Robots, Black Mirror (seasons 3–5) and Arcane are also relatively popular shows in the mentioned categories.
Wasn't this an episode of Black Mirror?
No, but only because I already saw that episode of black mirror.
This is straight out of an episode of Black Mirror
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_(Black_Mirror)
"Something stressing you out or making you uncomfortable? Just filter it! Continue ignorantly living in this filthy world, and never address or even confront the root cause of problems."
I do agree the toxic chat in games is a big turnoff, but I'm not sure about an AI solution to this very human problem. Maybe in this case it'd be good? But the generalized form of this kind of filtration still seems like a terrible idea.
This seems like an inflection point in it not being possible to write Black Mirror episodes anymore, because they will be hard to recognize as fiction.
Bloomberg is helping that along, too. "Create an account and unlock 1 bonus article."
Seems to me that most black mirror episodes are about the loss or restriction of freedom. I can't imagine a black mirror episode that starts with giving the protagonist autonomy and freedom instead of preventing it.
Your alternative I presume is just to treat everyone like a small child equally so that nobody can see anything potentially painful or commit any thought crimes (the ends etc etc). Certainly the internet is very hard to regulate with children but maybe they just shouldn't be spending so much time on it. It's much harder to keep track of 15v hours of usage a day vs 1 or 2. But again that's a personal responsibility thing. If a child gets hit by a car we examine the circumstances surrounding it, the logical conclusion most people would assume is not to sue the car manufacturer to prevent the operation of their vehicles. There's definitely a balance between corporate and personal responsibility but I'm strongly against the childification of the internet and apps that is occurring. It doesn't matter that most people don't understand something, if you prevent them from observing or utilizing it you're effectively enforcing that ignorance.
We should not be enforcing such restrictions. Any restriction may benefit some children, but will rob everyone of the ability to learn how to discern good from bad. We should not be training total reliance. Encountering difficulty is an essential part of human existence
There was a Black Mirror episode that almost went this far.
> that black mirror episode where the ad pauses if you close your eyes or look away, and you must pay to skip it.
if you have sky TV it has a DVR that lets you record programmes
but if you want to fast forward through the ads in programmes you have recorded you have to pay a monthly fee
https://www.sky.com/help/articles/ad-skipping
I expect the camera that tracks you leaving the room will be in the next generation
That was a pretty good Black Mirror episode!
Ha - how about "Bloody Mary"? I was 8 and that story scared the shit out of me. I love reading creepypastas, and when I was younger, I never knew if they were real or not. It was part of learning how to trust information. They always had enough of a disturbance in the story that made me feel odd.
I JUST saw The Backrooms (the one where she puts the tape measure down the portal) and... holy shit. This is the same level of odd feeling. I can only imagine what sort of VR stuff is out there... That Black Mirror episode has me wondering if I'll actually do something like that.
I think it's also the same sort of thing as the innocuous conspiracy theories I've seen like "Did you know that Spongebob characters are based on the seven deadly sins?" Could be true, you'll never be able to fully verify it unless you know the person who made the content, and ... sounds good and seems to hold up. Why would you want to dispel the theory even if it is untrue? It's kinda fun.
Similar thing with the MASS system in a Black Mirror episode (Men Against Fire) where visual reality could be substituted by your implants (or rather using your implants, and by the people in control of them).
And again in the Christmas special, which was more similar to this device in that it would block out certain things, or everything (though it was in software, and again under external control). Which sounds horrifying enough but was far from the worst thing in the episode.
No mention of Black Mirror in the comments yet - I'm surprised!
A lot of the other theorising here runs right alongside the premise of one of the stories told in the White Christmas episode[1].
IIRC the episode was very well done, as most of them are.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOHy4Ca9bkw
You're assuming that we're talking about a government surveillance setup where information is intended to be private. But the article's discussion still applies when the subject matter is canceling people on social networks.
In fact it seems even more apropos of the dual identity of both subject and narc that the article discusses. Traditional government surveillance makes most of us solely subjects with little role in the enforcement process. But in a world where mob justice applies social sanctions, we're all simultaneously judges and candidates to become defendants, able to be condemned by our own words. Encryption is irrelevant when those words are intended for public consumption.
Black Mirror did an episode on what it would look like if your social reputation were reified into concrete societal privileges. That kind of ad absurdum exploration makes the surveillance state of social networks much easier to recognize.
Happy to see another Black Mirror episode coming into fruition! :)
It does feel very "15 million merits" - finding something actually raw and authentic, and then coopting the surface aesthetic of it to sell bland corporate shit.
Note to anyone in corporate management - if you watch that Black Mirror episode and think that it's one of the few with a happy ending, you are the baddies.
Also, from the article - "grassroots". I'd have LOL'd if I hadn't just died inside.
Virtual Coachella is a hilarious take on a dystopian hellscape (not far from our present time). I love it. Like a Black Mirror episode, only condensed so that every single second is brilliant and packed with jokes.
That Black Mirror episode was disturbing.
This is the episode that got a colleague to quit watching Black Mirror: "too depressing"...
There's an episode of Black Mirror with AI killer robot dogs that is quietly terrifying.
I liked the Black Mirror Christmas episode. Really drove the point home for me about how "Code Rights" is going to be a real actual political and ethical thing. That and the seventies movie World On a Wire. Philosophical zombies don't have actual consciousnesses, feelings or other qualias, but it doesn't matter. When a simulation realises it's a simulation, a character in someone's book, it might just get very simulation pissed indeed at the situation like in that latter movie. And being a simulation doesn't lessen the simulated very real agony of for example torture and all that.
It's a good strategy not to make anything organism - like on AI - level, methinks. Although OTOH IBM:s Truenorth does save a lot of electricity so hmm... No. That's the worst kind: hardware - level biomimickry. Anything even organism - like is going to simulation - or - not (try to) take over. It's in the blueprint. Watson is correctly built: left - brain reductive - analytical output that advances by trial and error. Or Wolfram AI with it's hierarchical frames and being like a user interface. I suck at coding at that level for the time being but I think I see that point clearly. So don't mix code and data boys and girls.
I'm scared of a future in which uploading minds into computers and precisely simulating them becomes possible.
The concept of "the right to life" has been widely discussed.
I think there's an important right that all of us should also have - the right to die. If I want to stop living, I should be able to stop living. Nobody should be able to force me to continue living (and possibly suffering).
When we're able to copy someone's mind exactly and save it in a computer, and then replicate it endlessly, we take away that person's right to die. We enter the dark world shown in some episodes of Black Mirror (e.g. White Christmas or Black Museum) - where any person can hold a mini computer with a copy of someone else's mind where that someone is being constantly tortured. They can't even die. They are forced to suffer.
This possibility terrifies me to the point where I would consider killing myself (in a way that irrecoverably destroys my brain) just to prevent my mind from being copied.
The referred short story, Lena (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo) is amazing. It did a better work than did severel Black Mirror episodes (specially a section in the Christmas one) warning us about what would happen if we ever manage to digitize personalities.
In the end, things are always rigged towards those who have enough resources to do this kind of things and want to make more. If present crimes against humanism get a free ride, what we should expect about crimes against transhumanism?
Sounds like a black mirror episode
> Apps like these are causing mental decline, addiction and behavioral problems on a large scale, but the parents just dont care. As long as the kid is quiet with the smartphone in hand. So sad.
Honest question: did it really take having a child to realize this? I mean, most of us here grew up on the Internet and saw the trajectory coming how things devolved from Newsgroups--> Forums --> Myspace. It was day and night each iteration and it wasn't getting better, but significantly and starkly worse way to communicate.
I've been uniquely apathetic about Social media since it was created, and I have never been drawn into it for the aforementioned reasons plus I have a strong background in oratory that forces me to communicate in person; my concerns were that social media presented us with as an intrusive security threat vector, as it's entire buisness model relies on selling data, but I was only secondarily concerned with how vapid people were becoming. I figured it was always there, but it now gave them a platform to draw attention to themselves; so long it was confined to online antics, like on a chan, it will remain there.
Damn, was I wrong about that!
Flash forward to a few years ago and that Black Mirror episode (Nosedive) encapsulated what a lot of us felt inside as these things grew in popularity to the point of replacing people's entire identity. Flash forward a bit more and you get Social Dillema by the very people who created the thing (after they made their money of course) sounding the alarm: Tristan Harris. Flash forward another few months and you get Jan 6th, and all the implications that came with it, and this all started as a dumb LARP'ing thing on 8chan!
I struggle to see the threat of smart phone useage itself as a threat, because I have so many and rarely use them (I only have calls and text notifications on them for what and who I speak with); I often forget to bring them with me when I go out or simply just leave it in my backpack as I go on about my day, but I've seen struggling to see how people didn't see this coming.
It takes a nutmeg snorting, tidepod eating contest or I guess blackout challenge to get people to realize just how pointless, and quite frankly cancerous, this entire part of the tech Industry is.
> Apps like these are causing mental decline, addiction and behavioral problems on a large scale, but the parents just dont care. As long as the kid is quiet with the smartphone in hand. So sad.
I think it's over usage and a clear dependence on them; we all were around when gore was still a shock factor thing, and hung around chans; does that mean we all became depraved menaces to Society? Some maybe, but most of use learned that there is a clear divide between online and in real life behaviour that shouldn't be crossed: what I think failed for so many was that there was never any downtime where you spent time away from these apps and people started to emulate that behaviour in their everyday and THAT is what I think is the issue: people, young or otherwise, seek validation and acceptance from others. It's a hardwired survival mechanism, and that is what these corps have exploited for their own monetary gain.
Black Mirror had an episode covering this very issue called Hang the DJ. (Spoiler alert!) Essentially a giant computer was simulating billions of human-to-human relationships using virtual (but sentient) people to see which would work, and which wouldn't, in order to make a dating app more accurate, before culling them off. I thought it was absolutely terrifying, yet most viewers overlooked the ethical issues of mass simulation of life for trivial purposes and thought it was cute(!) (I should stress that in the episode, the virtual people caught up in this are portrayed as being sentient and aware, they're not just a bundle of numbers and formulas like "people" in a game like Simcity.)
And to your point, I loved Black Mirror but couldn’t get through the first episode of Severance.
Its interesting how different tastes people can have. I, for one, couldnt stand Foundation for more than three episodes. Severance, on the other hand, is like a one, series-long, good Black Mirror episode.
Black Mirror. For broad definition of sci-fi and broad definition of film.
I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode where a woman's dead boyfriend is "resurrected" via his social media exhaust trail, ultimately undermined by the inevitable uncanny valley that reveals itself. Of course that was fiction, and it's not realistic to reconstruct someone's personality from even the most voluminous online footprint, but you can certainly imagine how defensive people would become of the result of any such attempt irl.
Do none of these engineers watch black mirror? I feel like it should be recommended watching for all engineers to see how simple nice ideas can rapidly turn dystopian. I wish it was still in active production
> … and if I make a joke that is deemed offensive towards a minority group, would you never give me money again because I now so obviously hate that group of people I made a joke of?
Of course, and you shall be shunned like that Black Mirror episode where the people were blurred out.
Omg I think you nailed it. There’s a black mirror episode about this.
There is a black mirror episode about this which then extends into a whole robotic replacement for a lost loved one. As with all black mirror episodes, it’s pretty dystopian.
episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Right. I’m reminded of Travis Kalanick’s “super pumped” metric at Uber.
And of course that Black Mirror episode. Constantly evince a super positive energy or else.
I loved the whimsy. Felt a little like the exact opposite of a black mirror episode. Or maybe a world where
It's honestly like a black mirror episode. "I have to have maintain a mental model of how my black box ML car AI will act so I don't die or kill other road users... and it can be updated daily."
Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
Yes! It takes so much more to gain the kind of insight that is valuable for film/art. And it is very difficult to scale. I thought they were onto something when they were experimenting with the gamified Black Mirror stuff because A) it implied something totally new and proprietary in the artform and B) it could probably lead to more information and more feedback all around.
Also, they never even tried to build any sort of community or conversation around anything on the platform. No creative form of discovery for different types of viewers. It’s just a one-way interface of content rectangles that are presented to you in algorithmic order.
In my own personal view on this, I think we will see a whole plethora of boutique niche vod platforms built using off-the-shelf tech from the cloud providers. Netflix only had around a decade of a technological upper-hand and it’s been a couple years that anyone can build a VOD platform.
I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, some of the more mature shows are also simultaneously their most popular offerings. (Squid game, black mirror, the Witcher, etc.)
And I for one am glad when a show is rated TV-MA because it means that they can be more authentic and unfettered in terms of the vision for the show instead of watering it down to appeal to a broader demographic. "Television is for families" is purely your subjective anecdotal experience. There is a reason the expression is "Netflix and chill", not "Disney and chill".
Conversely, if you're not interested in yet another marvel show or movie, Star Wars or old animated movies, Disney+ is a desert.
People were all warned... So many things now are based on "Pump and Dump" culture that social media greases so well. Celebrities themselves, movies, cars, technology, humanitarian aid, mass shootings, and even dead celebrities are all commodities only worth their ability to trend (profitably) now. The more we buy in, the closer we get to that black mirror episode where you can't escape your social stats as a life-worthiness value.
Celebrities, influencers, and the rich gain pop followings they manipulate so easily into these traps where they can then pull the rug out and still play innocent for the next heist... This is the way the world works in our current Globalist Internet Based $ocial Media Celebrity Mining Capitali$tic NFT MLM phase.
If communism was better though, there would be no exotic sportscars in China and Russia though. Really it's vanity and the value we place on it that is most at fault, but the people that said it was a scam from day 1 are the people we should be listening to, not still the people that said "go all in". We also need to de-emphasize social media's strangle hold and have some serious and ugly public discussions on non-denominational morality.
One Black Mirror episode had these really cool round phone-like devices: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTg1NDE1MTEzMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjcxNzk0NDM@._V1_.jpg
> I hope this is true but I also feel like we no longer follow any kind of logic after 2008, we totally detached from reality.
You're not the only one, consider that the financial crisis was the per-cursur and the necessary backdrop for why Bitcoin was created; this system went from being an arcane, but seemingly reliable way to grow the economy up until 2008 when the house cards fell down and we realized most business models were all based on the 'greater fool theory.'
Monetizing everything and squeezing people for every nickle and dime for essentials became the norm: education, medicine, food, energy etc...
Honestly, this system only benefits a small fraction of the Human Population, but it ultimately relies on their continued exploitation. The great resignation has been a somewhat limited counter-banace but it's still not addressing the underlying fact that this system is so utterly broken and it cannot sustain itself without perpetual intervention from the Central Banks.
Their is nothing Capitalist about this system, it's feudalism with a very obvious plutocratic bend with it's aim to maintain itself via nepotism and corruption.
This isn't a criticism of Capitalism, though I have come to the conclusion that it is ultimately a flawed system that relies on perpetual and infinite growth models, and does an even poorer job at pricing-in externalities that have had and will continue to have even worse devastation: be it economical or environmental.
As an Anarcho-capitalist I agree it is the best of all the other worse system: I just think we have seen the limitations that even the freest markets can avail so long as the parallel system can destroy with impunity, but justify itself as the only thing that keeps the World from succumbing to utter chaos.
When in reality, we live in that chaos and have been in chaos for most of my entire existence (middle millennial) with only the thin veneer of order, what's remarkable is we haven't completely obliterated ourselves in that time--Russia is doing what most Nation-States have done since the advent of it's existance, and what the US did that made it the ire of Humanity in the last decade in the Middle East. They seek to consuldate and extract for thier own vested interests, often to the detriment of it's own populace as it really only seeks to maintain it's own order and enrich an already obscenely wealthy political class which curries favour from the business class.
Before, I used to watch Black Mirror or an Adam Curtis documentary solely for it's entertainment value, now I'm starting to see how prophetic much of what they focused on not just came into reality, but started to have more dire implications than was even portrayed.
In short, while those of us in the BTC community haven't the grounds to declare we have made a utopia by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just glad we have learned our lessons and realized the inevitable demise of the financial system is starting to become clearer to more and more.
Where this leads can be a horrible path, and we have had glimpses of it: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is over hubris and distorted views of the Soviet Union.
Just imagine what it will look like if we are fighting over water or food as we have for most of our Specie's existence?
People here benefited, or stand to benefit the most from this corrupt system: vesting is the only real way to make any real gains as it provides the bulk of most TC. Their inflated salaries at FAANG mean less when they hear the typical story about stocks getting IPO'd and even their first janitor team can afford to live in a mansion in Palo Alto and send his kids to Stanford.
But the truth is this model is utterly broken, just look at the environment and woke culture that the valley has become: homelessness, social inequality and worsening substance and mental health issues etc...
You'll just never get the HN crowds to go along with it because most are still just trying to 'get theirs' or have already 'gotten theirs' and are now too comfortable but keep telling themselves that rent-seeing is ok so long as it's them and they regard themselves as a 'disruptor.'
It's pathetic and a shame to see, to be honest. To see so many talented people waste their collective skills at a time when climate change, and shortages of everything are starting to be the norm: you'd think if they had any capacity to act in anything but their own self-interest and had a modicom of self-perseverance they'd try to sepnd at least some time trying to address these problems.
What good is money if this is this the World we live has always been my core moral compass that doesn't seem to be shared or well received when I work in tech. There is just a lots of lip-service but almost no deeds to back this up, it's a really just a bad platitude. One of many, unfortunately.
As a person studying AI and ML: you'd think that for a class of people who go on about 'meritocracy' being the end-all to explain why they are exceptional and are where they are and where most are they it's just hiding behind the limited window they have where the tech oligarchs allow them to be well compensated: but be under no illusion, they will quickly dispel with them when it's AI solution is as palatable is it can be, even if it means delivering a more mediocre solution and experience.
Straight out of a Black Mirror episode.
SiFi TV series 'Black Mirror' episode: 'Hated in the Nation' (2016) - IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709236/
<https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=black-mirror:'Bee drone swam'>
Westworld manages to make it work. Plenty of science fiction films like Interstellar make it work. Hell, Black Mirror's entire point is social commentary yet it doesn't feel woke.
> questioning the premises our society is based on
There's a difference between doing this in a way that also tells a coherent story and one that just forces themes that don't exist into the story. One of those things is woke and the other one is not.
Absolutely an algorithmic issue and your comment about edge cases is spot on. But when the algorithm flags an edge case, whatever happened to manual review by a human? In this case, any human looking at this transaction would have found nothing unusual.
I'm pretty sure there is a Black Mirror episode where someone ends up becoming an "edge case" and it all goes downhill from there. I haven't actually watched it but have read about it referenced in many similar contexts so maybe someone knows the actual episode.
A reminder to watch Black Mirror Season 3. There is an ugly future we're staring down the barrel of, illustrated in one of the episodes.
Follow up to off-topic. I have also thought the arcologies of Sim City 3000 or the unexplained environment in the Black Mirror episode "15 million merits"[1] are likely in our future.
0: https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Readers here love to crap all over Netflix, but it's still the service I use most. Yes, the movie selection is lackluster and yes, they make a lot of mediocre shows (though often for niches where fans of that content may have few other options). But they also make some of my favorite shows of all time like Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and Sex Education. And they've revived some of my favorite content of all time like Arrested Development, W/ Bob & David and Wet Hot American Summer (with mixed results, but still). Not to mention a lot of fringy comedy that may have otherwise never been produced, like I Think You Should Leave, Aunty Donna and Middleditch and Schwartz.
And they've brought content into the mainstream (in the US) that we otherwise may have never seen, like Black Mirror and Squid Game.
Throw in some flagship nature documentaries, a ton of stand up specials and the occasional cultural phenomenon like Stranger Things and I still feel like Netflix is easily worth the cost. And just because they produce a lot of crap doesn't negate any of the above. There is no number of Adam Sandler movies that will change how much I loved Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special.
Taste is not subjective. The critics (cc Metacritic, >>> Rotten Tomatoes) are usually right about TV/film.
Decent Netflix TV: Maid, Unbelievable, Ozark, Narcos, Bloodline, Mindhunter, Black Mirror, Sweet Tooth.
They average like one decent TV show every 18 months. It's an absolute disaster.
Interesting that there's still smalltalk in such a job. I always imagined that fitting into a specific image of an ideal person/worker is a burden that you have to carry in white-collar corporate jobs, while in low-end menial jobs you can just be your own grumpy self if you want to be, as nobody gives a damn as long as you get the job done. It was even portrayed in one episode of Black Mirror, where a truck driver was the only person free to express herself (because there was nothing she could lose, her job was not desirable).
Apparently engineers at Sony read 4chan green-text posts [1] and instead of realizing how dystopian it sounds, like something from a Black Mirror episode, go "Wow, that's amazing, we should do that" and then they file this patent.
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
Unsurprisingly, Black Mirror comes to mind:
> Whilst in his room, Bing sees an advert [...]. He cannot afford the merits to skip it, and a high-pitched noise sounds when he looks away from the screens, so he must watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
From a future Black Mirror episode:
"Welcome to Seaview Estates, a Safer Neighborhood(tm) by Amazon & in cooperation with the TSA.
We are proud of our award winning public transit connections. Our security officers will conduct quick, minimally invasive searches of all residents, visitors, pets and vehicles when leaving your house, and upon returning to a Safer Neighborhood.
Please note that delays should be expected when entering a Safer Neighborhood, so you should arrive early to clear our screening process.
All liquids, gels and powders should be in transparent containers of no more than 2 ounces, unless from a Safer Neighborhood certified vendor. Did you know that all products purchased through Amazon Prime are pre-certified?"
I'm not entirely convinced of that attitude; plenty of science fiction in a cyberpunk setting have strong underlying messages, of e.g. personal identity, capitalism, privacy, overpopulation, sex work, drugs, classism, AI, environment / global warming, etc; some of the big names there would be (imo, I'm no expert and I can't think of much) Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, The Matrix, some episodes of Love Death & Robots and even Black Mirror, to name a few.
I miss Black Mirror. Some episodes were hit-n-miss, but many of them made me think. The best part was that each episode was mostly independent of the other.
This reminds me a lot of Black Mirror season 2 episode 1.
Always good to treasure the time we are given.
If this is not already a Black Mirror episode, it should be.
Reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror - Fifteen Million Merits
Maybe a Black Mirror episode.
Sounds like an episode of black mirror
The world is going to be a Black Mirror episode one way or another. Here at META, our mission is to steer towards one of the more heartwarming ones.
> MoviePass is relaunching as a web3-style application where users earn credits to go to the movies by watching ads. The new MoviePass will use facial recognition and eye tracking tech in your phone to make sure that you’re actually watching those ads.
This article.
> Whilst in his room, Bing sees an advert for WraithBabes featuring Abi. He cannot afford the merits to skip it, and a high-pitched noise sounds when he looks away from the screens, so he must watch.
Black Mirror.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
There was a Black Mirror episode 15 Million Merits [1] where you either had to watch the ads (actually look at the screen) or pay to skip them!
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
OP, as a general rule, when something you're doing reminds someone of a Black Mirror episode, please re-evaluate your choices.
If they haven't seen that episode of Black Mirror let's not give them any ideas.
There's an excellent Black Mirror episode about tracking a child, looking through their eyes using implant, and even blocking stuff that could be scary or upsetting for them. Needless to say, it turned our quite bad for both child and parent.
Black Mirror is great in exposing how ideas which look good on the first look can have very dark side. I even thought some of these things would be great (e.g. recording everything you see) before watching BM, I didn't think at all about all the negative consequences. It's sobering.
That said, I share location with my wife and also monitoring our children. If you have full mutual trust with other person, there are no drawbacks but there are positive sides. Full trust implies that one doesn't monitor location constantly, that there's no jealousy or stalking, that's it's used basically when you're worried that something bad happened. If someone is late from school or work it's a relief if you see they're moving towards home or that they are at known location.
This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode of the digital sweatshop
Ah, yet another chilling reminder why Black Mirror doesn't have to make any new episodes.
> >It takes a lot of Tiger Kings, Queens Gambits, and Squid Games to match up against the Marvel and Star Wars universes > > Is he for real? Black Mirror alone explores more themes in a more creative way than the entire output of Hollywood over the past 10 years combined.
I think he's just talking about mass appeal, not quality. Netflix has lots of great stuff, but Disney has some of the biggest properties in film & TV.
Good concept for a Black Mirror episode
The “hook” is the worst part. It’s so hard to start a conversation from nothing and get it to stick in a meaningful way. People like to joke that those who treat Twitter like a dating app are misusing it, but I think it’s a better analog for real world dating than most things.
Once you build a sufficiently big group of mutuals on Twitter and get to know them a little bit without the pressure of relationship expectations, sparks seem to happen so much more naturally and organically just as they might in a workplace or school setting.
I don’t have much hope for online dating in its current form unless it gets to a level of AI invasiveness like in that one Black Mirror episode. Gatling gun dating just isn’t fun or effective.
Inb4 "social score" =)
We all watched that episode of Black Mirror.
> Once simulation technology is good enough, these simulated environments may even be occupied by simulated people, with simulated brains and bodies, who will undergo the whole process of birth, development, aging, and death. Like the nonplayer characters that one encounters in many video games, simulated people will be creatures of the simulation. Some worlds will be simulations set up for research or to make predictions about the future. For instance, a dating app (as seen on the TV series Black Mirror) could simulate many futures for a couple in order to see whether they are compatible.
> A historian might study what would have happened if Hitler had chosen not to start a war with the Soviet Union. Scientists might simulate whole universes from the Big Bang onward, with small variations to study the range of outcomes: How often does life develop? How often is there intelligence? How often is there a galactic civilization?
Uh huh.
Very well put, actively integrating the self-critique part is one of the most important things that allowed the current capitalist system to hold its top place (and even to thrive, at some points). The socialist system also tried to integrate the self-critique part ("auto-critică" it was called in Romanian) but failed to do that, hence why the external actors managed to take hold of the "critique of the socialism" discourse.
Back to the self critique of capitalism, I see punk as a prime example of that, it's what I think allowed capitalism to navigate through the turbulent (from a socio-economic point of view) late '70s - early '80s as well as it did. Grunge, on a smaller scale, did the same thing for the Western capitalism of the early '90s, shows like "Black Mirror" did that for the creeping surveillance capitalism of the mid 2010s (we now say "it's just like in a Black Mirror episode", without taking any concrete steps to mitigate the surveillance capitalism creeping in on us).
Discussing only on the merits of their content, and stipulating that this is neither here nor there with respect to Netflix's long-term prospects vs. HBO:
Breaking Bad isn't an HBO show. So I assume we're just asking, "has Netflix produced any world-class content". The answer to that is yes.
The jewel in their crown, their "Game of Thrones", is clearly Stranger Things. It's undeniably successful, each new season a cultural event. I'd put Stranger Things up against any HBO show for relevance and impact. (Perhaps not for artistic excellence; but, The Wire is the best show that's ever been on television, and it's far from the most watched).
Add to that Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Sex Ed, the annual Flanagan miniseries (Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass), Master of None, and Big Mouth.
They're doing about as well as any premium cable channel ever has. Doesn't, of course, mean you like their content! But I have about as much faith in Netflix coming up with a new prestige show than I do in HBO, most of whose recent stuff has left me pretty cold.
Yes indeed. During the 1990s I first became aware of this as a comedy trope.
Loads of TV shows were using these techniques to make the public say all kinds of crazy shit as if they were widely held opinions.
It was funny because back in the 90s it seemed like, well at least to me, that we still trusted journalists and we didn't have social media. So seeing interviews obviously manipulated was funny.
I can also remember Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror guy, showing the same footage from a set up reality TV show[1].
By just using editing he could show the same event but with very different interpretations.
Instinctively I think we all know that but seeing it done as demonstration is shocking and fascinating.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRW1cPGYgoQ
It's too bad they don't screen their actual content with the same rigor as they do their technical side. I don't doubt their technical side is excellent.
Most of Netflix is utterly mindless garbage content for background consumption. I struggle to name even 5 of their originals over the years that you could call good "TV" or Cinema.
Black Mirror is the only one that really comes to mind.
This reminds me of the Black Mirror's "Black Museum" episode...
There's really odd undertones in a lot of Netflix shows
Big Mouth (a cartoon) is about child sex
Emily in Paris, character lead has sex with a 17yo on screen.
There are more, I just can't bring them to mind at the moment. Perhaps I should begin to document them.
Hmm... Black Mirror (the Netflix episodes) had child sex in, End of The Fucking World had child sex in it; although both with negative consequences so poor examples.
Maybe it's coincidental, but it is something I've started to notice more and more.
Keep it in mind next time you watch some shows on Netflix and perhaps it will stand out.
A Pokemon GO - like game but developed by a subversive power to destabilize society further and further, inch by inch, slowly until the strength withers from within.
Would be a decent Black Mirror episode.
Sounds like you need to watch the White Christmas episode of Black Mirror.
This reads like the lead-in to an episode of Black Mirror.
Straight out of a Phillip K. Dick Novel.
Or a black mirror episode, either way.
> on this path to black mirror dystopia
A bunch of episodes of Black Mirror aren't really even about the future. They're criticism of things right now (or, rather, when the episodes were made).
Black mirror episodes are either really good or absolutely terrible.
Google de-listing websites reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror where everyone is wearing AR lenses and the person who just came out of prison or whatever is not visible to anyone else but is instead a red mosaic when seen through their lenses. He's effectively blacklisted in the physical world. Google (and other tech giants) have tremendous influence and power - as much or more than most governments. It is very dangerous that they act the way they act. We need to heavily regulate them or build public alternatives that are beholden to laws like the First Amendment.
> No, it is not. It is objectively good.
What is so objective about an opinion?
> Tons of people have tried to make films like that and have failed.
So Black Mirror has 'failed' successfully. /s
Waiting for the Black Mirror ripoff of the movie
Would make for a good Black Mirror episode.
Agree. I found it to be ok, but basically felt like an overstretched black mirror episode IMO.
This is painfully reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode “ Fifteen Million Merits”, in which at one moment the main character has to watch odious ad, be he does not have enough “money” to skip it.
Ubiquitous 5G, xfinity public access points, Amazon Echo networks will make it absolutely possible.
yeah black mirror is a horror series about technology going in the wrong direction. it was entertainment, not a documentary
Movies: - 12 angry men - Whiplash - Prestige - American Beauty - The Thing - V for Vendetta - The Grand Budapest Hotel - Gone Girl - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Parasite - ... Tarantino or Scorsese movies
Anime: - Howl's Moving Castle - Spirited Away
Not a movie but both great series: - Love, Death & Robots - Black Mirror
My other Four:
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant. o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling. o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.) o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show. o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it. o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though. o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess. o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it. o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
In the 80s we had cyberpunk dripping from everywhere, in the 90s we had movies like The Net from 1995: ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ ), and just recently(ish) we had Black Mirror.
People don't realize how deep the shit is becoming despite all these. We have successfully amused ourselves to death. (as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death )
I would personally classify interactive fiction closer to games, unless you count gamebooks in that, which I consider closer to books. There was also a movie where you get to get choices linked to Black Mirror that was popular recently, and a few people on youtube explored this by making different videos and letting you pick "what happens next".
There's also the whole genre of visual novels, mostly from Japan. I'm not sure if they are more games, books or interactive fiction.
Jesus FUCK that's a horrible idea. My neighbor is a maintenance guy for a sober living complex and he has talked to me about maintaining these kinds of high density environments, and this seems like a nightmare scenario just waiting to happen.
Also, just emotionally, this can't possibly work. There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy.
This reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where they ride the exercise bikes and earn credits and watch advertisements 24/7.
Is no one concerned about the Black Mirror possibilities of the meta verse? Zuck is talking about how the experience will be centered around you rather than an app, and that it will carry who you are and things like your virtual goods seamlessly between different experiences. I worry that other things will also follow users around everywhere. For example things like ratings or social credit scores, even if they’re user driven instead of state driven. Or perhaps people who committed some crime can be ostracized and blocked on everyone’s VR set, as if they didn’t exist. Maybe I am worrying about nothing, but various episodes of Black Mirror have played out the horrifying possibilities of pervasive connected augmented reality devices, and if the metaverse is going to be as amazing and powerful as Zuck thinks it will be, I anticipate there will be many such issues. Ultimately I am still left wondering why we need any of this. Can humans not simply exist and enjoy their real life analog experiences?
No wonder companies that aim to optimize/disrupt shipping are hiring so many ML engineers!
Maybe if the containers themselves were autonomous and mobile, and could optimize their own value… there’s a Black Mirror episode somewhere in that.
>It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story.
That feeling when you don't have a single original idea, and unironically view Black Mirror episodes as a blueprint.
Other way around. The Black Mirror episode was inspired by the early experiments with quadrupedal robots, especially those first terrifying Boston Dynamics videos. Like the one where the dude viciously kicks over the Big Dog and it relentlessly gets back up, and everyone's thinking "oh man, that guy is so dead as soon as these things get a brain"
Well, what other people alluded to was the performant part. That's also salient in some Black Mirror episodes now that I think about it.
While it is a first impression, it's just a first impression.
It feels a bit Black Mirror like to be honest. It kind of reminds me of the episode where people are dating each other. And in the end the dating turned out to be a simulation of many simulations so that a score could be determined between the real people. That episode (forgot the title) has a neighborhood that feels a bit like this (though more high tech).
There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not as exciting. You probably won't sell as many books or public appearances that way. And it doesn't make for the best Black Mirror episodes. Although there are a couple exceptions.
Truly this is like an episode of black mirror.
In addition to being a "dystopia multiplier", I predict this is going to cause a lot of social problems going forward. This is what the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You" warned us about.
I don't know about the sleepwalking part. I'd say we sprinted towards it. We've had dystopian scifi for much longer than we've had the tech, but the reality makes some of the scifi authors look like they didn't have much of an imagination. Now that we've seen some of the "tech", the modern dystopian scifi like Black Mirror scares the bejeebus out of me. There's somebody out there that sees Black Mirror episodes and thinks "YES!! That's exactly what we need!" Except, we have the tech to actually do some of it.
Reminds me of the episode Arkangel of Black Mirror
LMAO, this is some black mirror episode material.
I really hope this is the plot to a Black Mirror episode and not real life.
So, like that black mirror episode?
You could almost copy-paste the premise into a Black Mirror episode.
Also, anyone see that episode of Black Mirror with the contact lenses kids would wear? Similarities
From the macrumors keynote feed comments:
These keynotes are ****ing uncanny. Plays like a Black Mirror episode. Don't know why.
Nailed it.
I have not read the article but I'm positive that technology simply does not exist, at least it is not available commercially.
The idea of all day battery on a device that captures everything I see and hear was what I was obsessed over when I watched an episode of black mirror - the grain. It completely isn't the point but it was hard for me to not get excited about even a fictional breakthrough in technology.
This is a plot point in a black mirror episode! You should watch it if you haven't seen it, it's "White Christmas".
I see a Black Mirror episode where millions of AI generated girls influence an army of 14 year old real girls to take over the world and transfer power to the AI makers afterwards. It will be like "the Wave" [0] but fully a-b test optimized and on a world scale.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(1981_film)
This sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
Oh come on Charlie! At any level of abstraction, nothing is new. But stories aren't abstractions; they're fundamentally about people, emotions, and reactions. "Oh geez, another story set in WW2 London," said no-one, ever. Heck, I challenge you: go through all of the Black Mirror episodes and write a story that, rather than emphasizing the worst, most cruel and horrific outcome of the setting, does the opposite. It's not the idea that makes the story, it's the people. It's the emotions.
Imagine a close-up on a door-knob. It begins to turn. The door creaks....
What do you feel? Portent? Eagerness? Fear? What about a door-knob turning is unique?
It's like human faces. They (mostly) have eyes, a mouth, nose, lips, etc. But a few are extraordinarily nice to look at, even though they really only have those same things. Stories are like that. They've got to have plots, characters, (and in SF) presumptions about the world, but the extraordinary ones don't need a new kind of orifice, a new kind of sensor. They present something extraordinary with the thingies we already have. No-one ever said about a super-model, "Oh her? She's just got eyes and a nose and lips. Nothing new..."
This was literally an episode in "Black Mirror"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
> set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status.
"Can't Get Your Out Of My Head" and "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" are both required viewing epics in my mind.
The contrast in this interview here, between a "Black Mirror" think-piece, and the expanded-mind reality viewing of a "Can't" is remarkable. I want to give full respect to Brooker, and I don't know where one would really begin to evince the deep, wild, strong currents of an Adam Curtis film from Adam, but the coverage feels superficial, glancing, a glossy commentary. His videos are so deep, so powerful. They speak to longer, wider conflicts & tensions, and this interview keeps trying to reduce the discussion to contemporary points. Adams videos skip around between time points, but in a way that shows continuity, show how ever-present the tensions have been: while we get to visit some contemporary points & places, that wider pan-optic view is not as strong in this interview as what AC videos I've seen.
See also: many Black Mirror episodes.
> If it needs any kind of connectivity or it comes as a service - no way in hell I'm exposing my family to the risk of not being able to flush a toilet one day because of a tweet or god know what.
That sounds like the plot to a Black Mirror episode
> I dread to think what kind of shit a company with the funds of google or facebook could pull off
Me too. Sometimes I see these ideas in science fiction. I remember one black mirror episode where a tech company knows more about a suspect than the police. It's really unnerving watching them casually reveal all sorts of information, even the authorities seemed surprised.
Even worse is thinking about the resources governments have and the numberless ways they can abuse these powers.
I really like this - but I'd rather just pay $200 once than pay a subscription. If an issue is maintaining the models, you should make that a separate line item where you can pay as a subscription for updates or pay for the model on a yearly/monthly basis as necessary (some people might be OK with the level of OCR at any given moment).
What would be really interesting is if you could have some hardware that hooks into the HDMI port and with every flicker of the screen record and OCR everything, and add some diffing and compression and some really cool categorization algorithms and you could have something amazing.
---
Obviously this is an MVP but I imagine the perfected version of this would be able to see the difference between screenshots and use some sort of strongly-connected-component like algorithm and figure out which things are "browser" which things are "browser--hacker-news", and so forth. Create a great UI around this idea and even better UX and you have something interesting.
Hell, miniaturize some camera and hook it onto glasses and you have that one Black Mirror episode.
Makes me think of that Black Mirror episode... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780
Thought-provoking questions! For me, ad-tech creates a few interrelated concerns:
1. Pervasive, asymmetric surveillance increases the power differential between individuals and big corps/governments. The latter groups can use that power to preempt healthy competition, causing individual quality of life to stagnate in a local maximum.
2. Ads themselves are attention hijacking, thought injection, and manipulation/coercion—all forms of mind control. Most people consider their mind central to who they are (often along with body, memories, and personality), it's wrong to mess with that non-consensually. (No, clicking "accept ToS" isn't consent.)
3. Centralizing surveillance data (as by companies and governments) prevents the surveilled from protecting their own vulnerabilities from bad actors. It's like passwords: you can invest in memorizing many strong ones, or re-use one that's written on a post-it on your desk, but since in this metaphor the surveillants are also storing your password in plaintext in paper filing cabinets, so it doesn't matter how much effort you put into protecting your passwords. Put another way, if the Coke recipe or a Boeing blueprint were leaked, it's the company's loss, so they work hard to protect their secrets. But if someone hacks a consumer company's user data, it's the users who are affected; if it weren't for regulatory fines and news exposés, companies wouldn't even be hurt by such breaches.
As for the end-game goals: Companies surveil and advertise because they're allowed to and it works.
We see futuristic attention hijacking tech in sci-fi films and TV, like giant holograms [Blade Runner], ads that address each individual [Minority Report], or ads that stop until you're paying attention again [Black Mirror]. But it's less common to see futuristic attention protection tech. (That makes sense if you consider the funding source of these sci-fi productions.) Black Mirror did have one episode where a person was exiled from everyone else's senses, but I can't think of others.
[It works] The individual's goal could be total control over perception of the world. As a natural-born human, you can easily close your eyes, but your other senses are harder to dampen, and so provide vectors for involuntary thought injection (ads). Now with widespread earbud use, you can sort of close your ears too. But imagine installing an ad-blocker so your senses just didn't report ads, or your brain didn't perceive them? As with many technologies, it'd be quite dystopian if centrally controlled, quite freeing if under individual control. Even more fantastical would be the ability to experience but be unaffected by stimuli (including ads), which might not even be a technology exactly.
[They're allowed] The other goal could be simply to use our collective power (i.e. government) to more strictly regulate—or even ban—surveillance and advertising (and enforce it!). While this always possible, I'm afraid it's no longer realistic in U.S., though other countries could still pull it off, as could whatever government eventually replaces the American one.
Lastly, what if nothing were free? Part of the problem is that the difference between $0 and $1 is much, much larger than from $1 to $2, i.e. free is a way better price than even dirt cheap (or sometimes even being paid). Tech start-ups are especially guilty abusing the marketing power of "free" in combination with unsustainable infusions of venture capital, which is dishonest if not somewhat fraudulent. Business would survive the removal of tactics like "free + ads" and "loss leaders".
Well to be fair what was happening to Britney in large part preceded the writing of the episode (and IRL there was way less tech involved), so it's uncertain if the black mirror episode took inspiration from real life.
This reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror. The teenager has an implant that causes stressors to be blurred out, preventing anxiety.
<spoilers> During a fight, she starts hitting her mom and, because of the involved stress, she's unable to see the physical damage she's causing, ultimately murdering her. </spoilers>
If this was implemented broadly, it'd very quickly lead to reckless/dangerous behavior.
> In 10-20 years, "small killer robot swarm" will be achievable for a single individual.
There's a Black Mirror episode on this IIRC.
I'm not sure it's permissible to have a favourite Black Mirror episode which isn't San Junipero.
One million merits is my favorite black mirror episode.
The counter argument is that Black Mirror is an insanely popular TV show that shows exactly what technology innovation could bring - but again, from a dystopian perspective.
This is done in Black Mirror, Season 4 episode 5 Metalhead. It’s terrifying. The dogs were armed.
The Black Mirror episode "Men Against Fire", again with glasses that turn people into monsters, is a good counterpoint. In the one, the monsters are the truth; in the other, the monsters are the lie.
This sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode
Black Mirror anyone?
Highly recommend watching this episode: (spoilers on Wiki obviously) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
Soldiers naturally face immense PTSD from harming human beings. There is only one natural end game of this technological progression uninterrupted; soldiers will be coddled by tech to dehumanize the enemy.
I'm always amazed at how many people watch movies/TV like Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Terminator, Altered Carbon, Her, Ex Machina, Firefly, Cowbow Bebop, etc and think "Yeah, that looks like a future I want." Dystopian Sci-Fi is a warning, not a blueprint. Even the utopian Sci-Fis often reference a struggled past in transitioning to their societies. And a lot of these problems have to deal with surveillance or an adjacent technology (like Minority Report or the more realistic Psycho-Pass).
Amazon is going to sell access to Sidewalk to e.g. TV manufacturers (and anybody else), making money off of your internet connection.
Before Sidewalk, if a device manufacturer wanted to be able to get sensor/environmental/etc data back to the mothership, it had to either pair to a phone with bluetooth, use wifi (needs creds), or include a 2g modem with a SIM (pretty expensive). A customer who doesn't see a need for that device to have that connection just won't pair / give wifi creds, and the 2g modems/SIMs are expensive enough to keep them out of most devices.
In a world where Sidewalk is a viable option, a lot more devices will be sending whatever information they like that they can sample about you out of your house. Sure, it makes sense to carefully read the privacy policy when you're buying a echo dot or ring whatever, but are you going to be so careful when you're buying a toaster?
This episode of black mirror sucks.
That's pretty much the plot of the Black Mirror episode "Hated in the Nation" [1], except instead of smart contracts it was Twitter hashtags (and there was a nasty payback).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
> Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching.
I'm sorry, is this describing real life or an episode of Black Mirror? It's so blatantly dystopian that I'm at a loss for words.
Yes, we've all seen that(those) episode(s) of Black Mirror.
This sounds like the start of an episode of Black Mirror
GDPR really isn’t that complicated for most purposes - it boils down to: tell your users what data you store; let them delete their data if they want; let them export their data if they want. Which is not exactly unreasonable - the only scary thing was being obligated to do it by law with threats of fines if you didn’t. It wasn’t that hard to put together, particularly if you’re a normal centralised website or app that they were aiming at.
Whereas the OSB is: “if you run a service which lets users distribute ‘harmful’ content, then you’ll get pulled up in court. Plus it’s up to you to figure out what ‘harmful’ is; you’ll know it when you see it.”. Which sounds like the opening premise of a Black Mirror episode.
it would certainly sit comfortably in a black mirror episode, lol.
> The concept predates Black Mirror by decades.
Black Mirror was mentioned not because it pioneered this idea but because each episode shows a possible dystopian future associated with various technological advances.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, damn is that episode a good ~hour of scifi. Black Mirror has some great stuff, if you don't mind a lot of it being _dark_ as hell.
nit: His own neck, not the host's, wasn't it?
This is made me think about the Black Mirror Episode 'Fifteen Million Merits', where the protagonist struggles hard to get into a casting show out of hate. After he successfully got in and held an angry rant holding a glass shard against the host's throat his 'performance' turned out to be so popular that they made a weekly show out of it.
When I read the line about the patient offering to pay the ransom in full to stop his information from being shared, the "Shut Up and Dance" ransom episode from Black Mirror jumped out in my mind.
You should watch the first episode of Black Mirror. Depending upon your exact interpretation of the rules, this may contain an example.
"Mr. Kallos, ...[said] the device’s presence in New York underscored what he called the “militarization of the police.” He said the robotic dogs resembled those featured in the 2017 “Metalhead” episode of the television show “Black Mirror.”"
Indeed, there's a resemblance and that's because the "dogs" in that episode were modeled after Boston Dynamics BigDog robot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)). Using a robot with such connotations in roles where it'll frequently interact with the general populace was a mistake.
MIT Media Lab holds a discussion series around "Black Mirror" episodes. I think it's an interesting and engaging approach.
The MIT Media Lab is a community of creatives and technologists who may be active or future builders of the worlds that Black Mirror explores. This viewing and discussion series brings this community together to imagine and discuss technological futures and ethical implications, framed around the Black Mirror episodes we watch together. Each week we watch an episode and host a discussion facilitated by a researcher or practitioner whose work is pertinent to the episode.
https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/black-mirror/
I'm almost certain there are products that look nearly identical to this in Black Mirror. If not, it looks like it belongs in an episode.
We can also implant electronic eyes in everyones skulls, required by law. That way we can see if they're ever looking at illegal content.
(this is the premise of more than one Black Mirror episode)
>”It’s alarming to see them roll out these props from a bad Black Mirror episode”
Wow, talk about shots fired at Black Mirror’s production value and storylines over the seasons.
Obviously this isn't going to happen, but imagining it from a scifi perspective - honestly that sounds kind of horrifying to me?
This is a step further, but say we could interface directly with auditory areas to have access to a massive internal library of different sounds. You could play songs on demand, verbatim recall anything that was said to you in the past, etc.
Sounds pretty dope at first, but this kind of thing would likely be developed before future researchers fully understand the entire human brain. So that means they would not really understand how the brain would interface with it, especially across long time scales and a heterogeneous population.
Forget any sort of malicious action, and still God only knows the potential side effects. It could massively fuck with ability to learn over time, cause terrible rumination issues, maybe it could trigger psychosis in high risk individuals, maybe it would fuck up your dreams.
Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems.
Anyway, this mostly reminded me of that Black Mirror episode about the parent watching the kid via a brain implant, which I thought was too heavy handed. There are a ton of ways brain implants could be scary without using the super obvious surveillance angle. Honestly just the "blurring out of bad things" feature would have made for a cooler episode IMO.
> What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later?
Wet dream of surveillance tech.
50 years ago, if you had suggested that someday all your social connections would be instantly available to all serious secret services as well as big corps, people would laugh at you. You'd be the negative guy, against progress. 1984 fans were the paranoid tinfoil hat guys. Today it's reality. And only few actually care.
You don't want tech to automatically transcribe your thoughts. That's the only domain today where real privacy still exists.
There is a nice Black Mirror episode about this.
Black Mirror is more polarizing than I expected. I watched San Junipero with someone. I thought it was adorable. He thought it was horrifying. The rest of the few episodes I watched made me feel the way he did, though. People bring different lenses to media and culture generally. I think that might be the point of the show.
I’m confused too. It reminds me of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back.” A woman’s husband passed away, and she uses a service that aggregates his social media to make a profile of him, so she can talk to him again in a convincing way.
More fairly popular pop culture that this might mirror is the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire where the AR implants are being used to trick their soldiers into thinking regular humans are some mutant creature to make it easier to pull the trigger and kill them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
It wouldn't be a black mirror episode unless these militants were able to record the memory of each of the animals before they were slaughtered, record that into the prions to have people experience the entire lifetime of an animal raised for slaughter with every bite... before succumbing to vCJD, of course.
I half expect a very scary Black Mirror episode where a militant vegan faction devises a way to spread prions throughout the meat supply chain on a timed release so it hits everywhere at once. Only for the blowback to somehow far exceed their worst dystopian nightmares.
Is there a way to somehow pack chemical or electrical energy into these highly favorable stable endpoint configurations, and release it?
Reminds me of that one Black Mirror episode
> It's the only way that really works. Informing people and building a movement.
I see. You underestimate or don't think that tracking today is the issue. Whats leaked cannot be unleaked. So far big tech only uses it for ads. Tomorrow it'll use it for banking, insurance, job applicants assessments, like Social Credit System in China today. Data sources are enormous, movement, friends, calls, chats, emails, purchases, searches and so on. "Person googles for drinking problems periodically since 2014."
So when it does become an issue in real life, it'll be too late, all data is already collected and processed into profiles.
And not only our data. Every school kid with Chromebook and Google account.
PS: Did you see this episode? If not, its my favourite, fun and scary at same time :)) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Sounds like a Black Mirror episode
> This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol
Thinking of what a “cooperation protocol” might entail is very chilling. Reminds me of an earlier black mirror episode.
The Black Mirror episode is actually closer to a different holodeck episode (they made a lot of them) called Hollow Pursuits, where an introverted engineer creates simulated versions of his crewmates in order to act out his fantasies.
I don't know if Star Trek invented this particular subgenre, but there are a lot of modern examples that seem directly inspired by Star Trek episodes. In addition to Black Mirror, the Rick and Morty episode M. Night Shaym-Aliens! has a lot of similarities with Future Imperfect, another simulation-within-a-simulation TNG episode.
Also the Christmas special of Black Mirror. It's about a police interrogation on a brain scan where you have less ethical issues getting in the way (arguably). A few other black mirror episodes touch on the same thing, but not nearly as much as this one.
Probably near my favorite black mirror episode for the sheer amount of dread it's caused me.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3973198/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5058700/
Huh, I was familiar with this trope from the Black Mirror episode that explores the same theme, down to Star Trek-esque uniforms and ship layout, had no idea it was based off of an actual Star Trek episode.
Also a Black mirror episode.
They have network effect and can destroy a great legal and valid business just because an advertiser doesn’t like it.
As long as they moderate separately, the businesses have chance to survive.
Black Mirror had an episode with social scoring system that looks like the future, but is already happening on a small scale.
Also if you want to see a movie with moderation turned on by multiple parties, watch the new Mulan and compare to the old one.
This is beautiful stupidity. Can't wait for the Black Mirror episode. The twist ending could be that he falls in love with his hacker and leaves his wife.
This sounds dystopian to me. I already can't stand Google Docs grammar checker trying to re-write my sentences to match some AI's idea of a correct sentence. Sure, when it actually detects a mistake I'm happy but 20% of the time it's just wrong and feels like it's trying to take my personality out of my writing.
Your suggestion sounds like a step to toward the Black Mirror Season 2 "White Christmas" episode where the main character gets ban from all social interaction (not just online) forever until death
Well that sounds like a Black Mirror episode — “Crowdfund your schoolfriend to not be euthanised”
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode
I’ve seen that episode of Black Mirror (or it at least sounds like one)
Every technological advance is usually both good and bad. Some are more good, some are more bad. Sometimes we gain a lot by it, and only lose a little, other times what we gain is not worth what we lost.
The problem with this idea is what makes life valuable the machine would not know. “Life’s best practices” is subjective, and therefore the machine could promote what one considers a best practice that another considers a worst practice.
Black Mirror did an episode on how this kind of AI would affect grief as well[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
Black Mirror, "Be Right Back", Season 2, Episode 1 [1] has this very plot.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
This was quite literally an episode of Black Mirror ("Be Right Back" - S2E1)
If you haven't tried Microsoft's voice synthesis service, it's incredible so maybe they'll have something here in 10 years.
(Scroll down to the demo box) - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#product-overview
I loved that episode of Black Mirror (“be right back”, discussed in the article).
There was a chat app a few years back — I can’t remember what it was called, but it was the hot topic for a few weeks – which was supposed to be like an AI friend that you could talk to. I installed it to see what the hubbub was about, and within 72 hours (a) it started flirting with me (I’m thinking about you ;)), and (b) I discovered that the default was to publish excerpts from your conversations, tweet-like, to “inspire” other users. What a horror show. I uninstalled it like I was holding a live spider in my hands instead of my phone.
I’m embarrassed to admit that a Her-like AI is appealing to me, but my need to not have Microsoft plunging into my inner psyche is pretty intense.
What you’re describing was in a Black Mirror episode. You might want to think deeper on what “rough justice” looked like historically and how it was treated by history before so eagerly embracing it.
wow, this was my favourite black mirror episode!
I'm pretty sure that one Black Mirror episode has prior art on this.
This concept you've described is literally a Black Mirror episode. Those are not intended to be encouraging.
I have to admit i'm too old to understand why anyone would like this (but I have that with Instagram too for years already). Crazy I don't know, just different generations having access to tools no-one had before.
I was thinking that no (as far as I know outside black mirror) scifi series/movies got that right; that people will in the future largely (if this trend continues that is, but there is no reason to assume it will not) worry about how they look every second of the day, video/photo it and then getting likes on short videos that will be forgotten 10 minutes later.
Perhaps you can recommend some movies and shows then? I'd really appreciate it. Aside from Ex Machina and a few choice others like Moon and Black Mirror, I really haven't found any recent intellectual films or shows.
Next step, ever watched "15 million merits", an episode of Black Mirror? If you close your eyes, an excruciating sound requires you to open them again and continue watching.
The Program audio series premiered on HN in June 2018 [1], followed by an official launch in November 2019 [2]. Since then the show received 135,000 downloads and was featured by Apple Podcasts in 6 countries.
The community here was nothing but supportive (bberenberg just sponsored an episode by paying for audio equipment, and many other HN users are show patrons) so I am now trying to give back by posting transparent updates regarding the project every 6 months or so. I write these reports the way I'd like to read them, which is to say I divulge concrete numbers and share not only the wins, but fails as well. I believe a lot of lessons (and mistakes) contained within can be applied to creative projects beyond podcasts, so hopefully it comes in useful.
For those who haven’t heard (of) The Program audio series before, imagine Black Mirror as a podcast. Every episode is a standalone story set in a future in which Money, State, and God have been fused into a single entity called the Program. The world of the Program is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, as the new system produced both winners and losers - ordinary men and women who are sometimes heroes and sometimes the villains of their own lives. And to them, it is not this future they find terrifying - but our present.
Comments/questions welcome!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17425278
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21704417
Wow! Black Mirror's Nosedive (Season 3 Episode 1) [1] is straight out of reality.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
We are allies with Korea. But that Black Mirror episode gave me chills.
I'm not sure if this is what you're alluding to, but that's literally the plot to an episode of Black Mirror. The robots are even clearly inspired by Boston Dyanmics
That sure sounds like a dystopia to me, reads like a Black Mirror episode.
"The notion of resurrecting people as digital entities is becoming less hypothetical. But just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be."
I'm sure I've seen this episode of Black Mirror before...
On a serious note, this is quite sad and raises questions about mortality in a digital world.
> Facebook isn't a public utility that is somehow obligated to relay and promote all speech equally
I understand what Facebook is and isn't obligated to do. I'm not saying they are obligated to be neutral. They are not obligated to play the role of speech police either. I am saying it would be better for society as a whole if they leave adults to make up their own minds about speech. Speech should not be controlled by corporations.
Yes, they can impose whatever limits they want. That doesn't meant that it's good or that we should be happy about it or that we are not allowed to question whatever limits they impose.
And sure you can argue "just don't use Facebook". That is fine, for now. Facebook is a large, but not completely necessary part of society. What happens when it becomes larger and more necessary (or another company does) and we've already imbued them with the power to decide what people are and are not allowed to say? Do you think then they'll just give that power up?
Have you seen that episode of Black Mirror where you can literally ghost people? I forget exactly, but there was some way to punish people by making them physically invisible and inaudible, so they had could barely interact with the world. I guess they could still eat, but they couldn't talk to or be acknowledged by anyone.
Obviously, getting banned from Facebook is not that, but it's maybe Version 0.01 of that, and I get the distinct impression that people here would be perfectly fine with that as long as it happens to people they don't like.
This is a great opening pitch for a new Black Mirror episode.
Black Mirror season 6, is that you?
This reminds me, is there going to be a Black Mirror season 6?
This is terrifying. And it might be where they got inspiration for the Black Mirror episode ‚White Christmas‘.
As a joke, it will also make films, such as the pilot of Black Mirror, pretty undramatic: "Was it really the British prime minister who had intercourse with a pig, or was it just a deep fake?" :)))
And I was surprised to know that this has made its way into hiring! So, the job hunt is going to get even more superfluous? Really reminds me of that Episode in Black Mirror, where everything depends on your rating..
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive". Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
This is an episode of Black Mirror, coming to our reality sooner than thought.
Netflix Trailer https://youtu.be/R32qWdOWrTo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
>Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing with its sponsor.
There was literally a Black Mirror episode about something very similar.
A government system is only good as the governance. In China's case, it is only as good as the CCP dictator. What if the next leader of CCP is corrupt or even worse, incompetent af?
On the other hand, in a democracy that accepts and markets social score is pretty bad as well. This black mirror episode captures the social score society really well https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
One might say, oh this is just scoring minor misdemeanor-type activity. Misdemeanors are also only as good as the law classifying crime. Here are some weird US misdemeanors https://www.teenvogue.com/story/7-federal-misdemeanors-worse-than-illegally-crossing-border
I'm no fan of US politics. But I am strongly for the principle that the government serves the people and not the other way around. And in that, I don't want the government )or some bureaucrats) deciding the future of a human.
The "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror [0] is a nice thought experiment, where the whole person's life revolves around a social media score.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
This film could have been much shorter without the cheesy subplot which felt like a bad episode of Black Mirror.
There's a few black mirror episodes on this theme, search for the "cookies"episodes
We're living in the gold ages before everything we do within eyeshot of anyone is recorded like that Black Mirror episode anyone can review/share anything they've seen with their own eyes.
And it's going to be very interesting, to say the least. This facial recognition war is just the start of our attempt to engineer ethics for the new era.
I mean, just imagine how sex will be different in this world.
Probs tech that can be inserted into your mind. like that black mirror episode. I mean musk is already creating one to do something similar
Yes, simulating real people for entertainment value seems to be the primary use case at this point. I'm just unsure that the value tradeoff between "simulating real people for entertainment" and "simulating real people for fraud, propaganda, misinformation, etc." is in our favor. It's inevitable, we'll just need to adapt.
I recently lost my dog. The idea of interacting with a virtual model of her to help ease the grief is interesting and scary, and ripped straight from a Black Mirror episode.
Oh my, that reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the red-headed girl that only thought about her rating 24/7.
Edit: Season 3, Episode 1 "Nosedive"
Wasn't it disclosed through the Ashley Madison hack that they were employing bots (and real people) to keep the clients busy and lure them into buying more "chatting privileges" (number of messages etc.?
So this has already happened to some degree. As AI (aka humans teaching computers) to make for better "hungrier" chatboxes, with the escalation (buy more messages, send client to next tier), sell a "more personalized package" (to use the parent comment of his friend).
This could do a nice Black Mirror episode. Like the one where she lost her husband, her friend registered for the Tier1 service and it went on from that..
With GPT-3 I think we are rushing towards the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, where through someone's recorded presence an AI avatar and later a full bodied android could be created.
... that being said, an authoritarian state with decentralized power structure is also an interesting concept. The episodes about social scoring from Black Mirror [1] and The Orville [2] might go into that direction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
[2] https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule
I agree that Black Mirror is one of the few original attempts at doing proper scifi about the near future, that we’ve had in quite some time. I wish it were not so utterly depressing, my mental health can barely stomach a single episode every month or so. If that were a genre, I would call it “cybercynical”.
This extension reminded me of that Black Mirror episode where a mother filtered what her daughter could see and hear.
Great work with TensorFlow by the way, can't wait to see this technology maturing over the years.
isn't that like most episodes of STTNG? All the fuckups are becuse exceptional situations, usually involving tachyons.
Or many others did too. Earth Final Conflict for one, the hand tablets. Hell Tech works amazing in black mirror, one might argue WAY TOO WELL.
jŭs′tə-fī″: To demonstrate or prove to be just, right, or valid. (I guess you're going for "valid") ;-)
Spoiler: We're naive and want to make the world better! (yes, I've seen all Black Mirror episodes AND we have weekly drinks where we think up scenario's where our company is the villain) But we need to protect our business not swindle our early customers.
Hah. Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where everyone is chasing upvotes, and one lady doesn’t GAF.
It would be difficult to concoct a more diabolic mechanism for driving people insane than a disembodied voice that is constantly whispering in your ears.
The whole experiment reads like the beginning of a Black Mirror episode!
This article notes that Tang is a digital minister and has experience with information technology. My impression is that Taiwan has a very healthy and balanced demographic of politicians. I have seen Taiwanese mathematicians, doctors, engineers, and chemists fill important government roles involving the spotlight and advocacy. It seems that people of technical expertise in Taiwan have an equally viable chance at entering politics and policy-making.
This is not to say that scientists, engineers, or doctors make for better policymakers. Perhaps there is a case to be made that career politicians have skillsets that validate the need to specialize in politics. However, the stereotype of career politicians is that of ignorance with no understanding of subject matter for the things that they make policies for. This impression was cemented further after the hearing between Zuckerberg and Congress about Facebook. This video even plays it for laughs: "Zuckerberg explains the internet to Congress", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbb5B85sd0. For the government to help its people, it needs to incentivize diversity within its ranks so that it can understand the variety of issues that it faces. It also needs to be able to adapt to changing realities.
Regarding what Tang talks about: I frequently think that what is happening over there are the emulations of unethical experiments (I hear the TV show Black Mirror is similar) that the Western world would never be able to pull off. Regardless of where one stands on this issue, I do not think it can be denied that a lot can be learned about how these systems operate at scale or how the machine runs. From the reports and stories that we get to hear about, it seems like the Chinese government is implementing technology at scales that most countries could ever dream of doing.
Or rather, most countries could only dream of creating technological systems of control with the degree of acceptance by the populace, with degree of penetration and overall dissemination. Western governments have implemented comparable systems, like the ones that Edward Snowden pointed out. However, if governments did not worry about hiding questionable activity, maybe it could double down on the level of sophistication and expand on its capabilities.
Earthlings (2005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlings_(film)
Black Mirror, season 1 episode 1, “The National Anthem”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_(Black_Mirror)
There is a short part of this in Black Mirror episode: Fifteen Million Merits.
To earn credits you must look at an ad-video, but when he looks away the video stops and makes a crazy sound so you'll continue to watch the ad...
This would make for a great episode of Black Mirror.
Seriously, this hack should inspire the most terrifying Black Mirror episode yet.
> The entire time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in a dystopian future [...] they use facial recognition at crosswalks and then put up the name and picture of violators on a huge screen at the intersection
"feeling of a dystopian future"? That sounds straight like from an episode of Black Mirror.
50k? Serious question from someone who's never tried: why not just get a loan? I've only watched one episode (I hated it, it reminded me way too much of black mirror's "15 million merits") but the deals they were cutting were... not good. Is it really that hard to get a loan for 50k as a business? Isn't that what small business loans are for?
> ... web pages that talk to ... health devices ... there is no way to block ads in an app
Wait, what?? Why on earth would you use an app with ads for health devices?!?
Moreover, why on earth are you using apps with ads for anything?
Please, please, please, pay for your apps and games. Stop making everything an ad service. The race to the bottom in the web and mobile world is disturbing.
Would you want to pay for your house plumbing by being forced to watch an ad every time you shower? Think about how dystopian that sounds. There are even Black Mirror episodes on that.
I think most people in tech are more introverted, but some of us are huge extroverts, and this has been incredibly trying. Clamping down on news coverage has helped a lot in my case, because it feels like I'm in some Black Mirror mass insanity episode!
I agree with that but we're talking about things that are really measurements of your mind right? What kind of articles do you read, what kind of posts do you like, products you like to buy etc. The Tech giants use rough simulacra of your mind to try and target you as efficiently as possible with ads. This seems like some kind of Black Mirror episode to me.
This. There is an amazing Black Mirror episode that treads on this subject: Men Against Fire (S03E05) [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
>This app could help rioters decide whether to burn down a building, if there's kids inside they can pick another one.
I've seen the phrase "this is like a Black Mirror episode" getting tossed a lot but this is the first time I feel like it genuinely is. Not to mention you didn't even consider a case where someone would lie or list your own house.
It might also come from detecting recurring patterns and trying to facilitate them.
Before the simplified version, we already used to only register to Netflix during long vacations, binge watch whatever we wanted (typically Black Mirror and Sherlock) and cancel the rest of the year.
Now that it’s way easier, there’s less friction in reenabling the account when there’s a series we want to watch and set the subscripting to cancel again at the end of the month.
I think I saw that episode of Black Mirror.
Also I shouldn't have said "nobody else has tackled that idea", I am sure it has come up somewhere else. I am just thinking of recent examples like Black Mirror or the new Upload show on Amazon, that IMO miss opportunities to fully explore the implications of simulated minds. Stuff like that would be very difficult to film though...
I wish advertising would be pull not push, I feel we're closing on to the 2rd episode of Black Mirror where the protagonist isn't allowed to close their eyes during an ad on TV.
> Mr. Robot was about Occupy
I'm a Mr. Robot fan, and a real fan of Kor's influence (an ex security guy at Toyota!) on the show but I likely took a very different perspective from it than most as I'm a crypto nerd.
To me the series was like a dramatization of Naomi Campbell's Shock Doctrine [1] with very well portrayed hacks and exploits (I'm not a pen tester but some OPESEC stuff was quite accurate). And their crypto stuff was actually well developed and researched. And some hero vs villeins characters to keep things going.
SPOILER ALLERT
The occupy overtones felt like a distraction, and a tired trope to me; the masks were an obvious nod to the Guy Faux maskes representing Anonymous, but beyond that I think it was rather lacking any real substance--Season 3's riot at E-corp showed how quickly things escalate to violent mob-rule even against the supposed protagonists. The redistribution of wealth via a hack against the 1%'s seemed forced and cobbled together because Sam wanted the ending to fit that narrative and quite frankly it felt forcefully coaxed; whereas the mental health, loneliness and substance abuse plot was very well paced and fleshed out throughout the series.
I wasn't really satisfied with how that last hack drove the series end and how the last 'hack' saved the World was rather ridiculous to me as result--and this is from perhaps one of the most anti-nuclear voices on HN! And he survived to see his plan triumph, because reasons we cannot and will not explain beyond some far fetched off scene make-believe you will just have to accept.
I've never seen Homeland; to be honest I don't really watch TV much as popular shows feel boring to things that happen in the many sub-cultures and communities I'm involved in. That guy from Occupy I mentioned before got me into Mr. Robot at the end of season 1 but I didn't get into it much until the E-Coin vs Bitcoin plot development in S2 and binged most of it until that part.
Even during this lockdown I've been mainly re-watching/listening to old races, concerts and DJ sets while I study and do stuff. I have like 5 audio books I'm waiting to sink my teeth into so I'm afraid I won't get to see Home Coming anytime, either. I'll check out the trailer, but that's rather glib representation I imagine.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGmB63TIHLY
Edit: Saw trailer: eh, Black Mirror's Men Against Fire did that plot brilliantly, and this seems like an elongated version of it. And what is Sam's obsession with fish tanks?
PS: I don't think I've clarified my position with the Shock Doctrine; I agree with Campbell's premise, but not her conclusion(s), as Free Market Capitalism is not what is inserted in the 'window of operation' from the disaster/shock to the system, but rather a very parasitic corporate plutocracy emerges in the way Mussolini defined Fascism (the merging of State and Corporate power) is what inserts itself in practice. Even Pricenton has defined the US as an Oligarchy.
> (My VR goggles will gray out billboards, etc.)
I think it'll be the exact opposite. I think the Black Mirror episodes are closer to what will be in our (not too distant) future. The content will track your gaze, and if you are not looking at the ad, then measures will be taken to get your attention back to where "it should be".
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
I think there’s an outside chance it could happen. Jerry Seinfeld has a deal with Netflix. Netflix has been exploring interactive television technology, for example that choose your own adventure black mirror episode that came out last year. I could imagine Netflix meeting with these guys and pitching a deal where Seinfeld/Castle Rock most of the money.
Sounds similar to the fictional tech used in a black mirror episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Maybe force the lawmakers to include a text explaining the "spirit" of the law, also including indicators to the law effectiveness. For example, a law is implemented to bring down then "car accidents per million" indicator. If one year later car accidents are the same or more then the law is scrapped.
What you propose of robo-lawyers and law as code sounds as the script for a futuristic Kafka's "The Process" as an episode of Black Mirror.
> related to a thread about bots speaking like dead people made from analyzing all digital content
Could you please send me the link to this? It sounds like that Black Mirror episode ("Be right back"), but I never liked how they treated the subject and was thinking of giving it a go myself
This sounds like an episode of black mirror and seems immoral.
If this actually does work and scale the results would be horrific.
I don't really want brains with no rights to exist like this.
This reminds me of the “Fifteen Million Merits” episode of Black Mirror[1] where people are either automatically charged to skip certain content or forced to watch if they can’t afford to skip.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Are you writing a “Black Mirror” episode?
What kind insane countries could that be? Sounds like a black mirror episode ;-)
I mean while this is a flippant response, this does highlight something that doesn't really exist at the moment: second order derivative lists.
You make a list and then I prioritise and filter your list.
Making a list of your top 100 books implicitly rejects all other books. Me taking your list of 100 books and rejecting a load with justification gives a lot more information about what I value in the books and, moreover, which of your values I disagree with.
We kind of have this with comment trees but it will often be the case that someone publishes a list (e.g. all of the episodes of Black Mirror in order of preference or all Studio Ghibli films in order of preference) and then the comments will take issue with the inclusion of certain items, exclusion of certain items or the placement of certain items. What you rarely get is the commentator publishing their own version of the list and what you never get is the commentator creating a completely derivative list.
Oh hey Charlie Stross! I'm a bit of a fan.
- - - -
I have a vague idea that a kind of spittle bug foam design made from bubbles of various diameters nested to provide redundancy might work well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittle_bug#Spittlebug_nymphs
It's could be simple, flexible, easy to construct or modify, and resilient to impacts. I'm not an engineer or scientist though.
- - - -
A tangent, if I may...
I think we need more near-term hard sci-fi set in the future that e.g. Musk's space trucks are about to enable, to get more people excited and involved.
I've been trawling through Netflix and cable recently looking for inspiring, even-slightly-realistic sci-fi and it's a barren desert out there. There are a handful of shows that aren't bad, and I've heard good things about "Black Mirror". One the other hand, I watched a clip of "Star Trek: Discovery" the other day and had a minor apoplexy. It's more like a cartoon than the actual cartoon.
In contrast, I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set that my sister got me for Christmas one year, and a lot of the older black & white sci-fi movies are practically documentaries for space exploration and colonization. Sure there are silly aliens and such, but the technology and settings are realistic (at least compared to e.g. Star Trek or Star Wars.)
I think some concrete visions of what it might actually be like to attempt to build and live on a moonbase or Mars colony would inspire people to want to really do it.
Just last night I listened to something on NPR about CAPTCHA v3, which doesn't involve checkboxes nor pointing at parking meters anymore. It samples page activity and interactions by the user and supplies a human-likelihood score to the site (h/t Twitter bot scorers).
So we live in a future where our activity is bounded by a variety of quality scores. You're mostly a human, your site's increased traffic is less legitimate...every Taylorist-Goodhartian aspect of existence is priced into the marketplaces of society.
Perhaps a decent analogy could be Black Mirror's "Nosedive" episode, but with endless dimensions instead of just one (which admittedly could be a derived score from the dimensional ratings), and ratings that aren't derived from the moods of peers and other interactors, but passively gathered from everyday behavior.
I think this is the NPR show episode: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/24/716854013/episode-908-i-am-not-a-robot
I honestly feel cranky if I have been in the house for too long. I long for a nice walk in nature, which in a city could mean a walk in the park.
I'm not sure how people can live inside all the time, it would be like that Black Mirror episode where all they do is play video games and rack up points to try and get out of it. It would be like prison.
Forcing people to keep their eyes open during ads happened in Black Mirror, the "15 Million Merits" episode.
I also regularly think about such doomsday scenarios, and agree it's sadly likely that at some point (probably not in our lifetimes, but maybe it will be...), it will become practical for a single intelligent, resourceful individual to kill millions of people, or more. I made another comment about this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042022
I unfortunately think it'll likely successfully occur at least once, and I think there will be other attempts from copycats (like people who idolize the Columbine shooters), Aum Shinrikyo-style death cults, terrorist organizations, and perhaps unintentionally from nation-states who greatly underestimate the capability of the deadly technology they're using. Maybe even intentionally from nation-states, if their government becomes hijacked by a terrorist group or death cult. I think such people will poke at every possible dimension: nuclear/biological/chemical weapons, nano-bots like that Black Mirror killer bee episode, seeding some sort of thing into the atmosphere to destroy it... there are going to be some people who will genuinely dedicate their lives to trying to end all known intelligent life, and there is a horrifying chance some/one of them might fully succeed; perhaps a small group or a lone wolf.
It will be a vanishingly minuscule percentage of the population who would ever consider something so abhorrent, but of course it only takes one. If you traveled from the future back to today and handed an easy-to-use WMD to one of the mass shooters we keep hearing about on the news, a good percentage of them would probably deploy it with little hesitation. If the Las Vegas shooter invested so much effort to be able to massacre hundreds of strangers, and you handed him an easy way to massacre millions, he'd probably be overjoyed at all of the work you just saved him.
This is a horrifying image of humanity's future. I think this is probably a greater risk than some sort of WWIII, though that's definitely also a risk. Unfortunately, I see no reasonable solution to this other than most countries' citizens collectively accepting an all-encompassing Big Brother-style surveillance state. Even then, it still might all be for naught, since it obviously can't catch absolutely everything. But maybe it's the only way to give humanity a fighting chance (at least hypothetically until there's some way to achieve near-perfect immortality, even in response to a super-WMD, maybe by scattering the galaxy with quadrillions of pieces of technology that somehow allow most consciousnesses to retain their existences, or something crazy like that? who knows - such a thing probably couldn't exist even in 50,000 years).
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.", yes. But what if you must give up essential liberty in order to have any safety at all? I think this is a terrible and wrong argument in 2020, and probably also in 2080, and maybe also in 2120. But in 2320? 2620?
We also don't know how AI or perhaps AGI may play a role in all of this. This sort of absurdly asymmetric destruction may be possible long before AGI is created, or perhaps only long after it. AI or AGI could be a great aid both to the people trying to prevent this and the people trying to perpetrate it. Maybe an AI not that much more sophisticated than the ones we have today could have an impact.
Jesus, your premise here is far more interesting than the entire last season of black mirror. Would watch this episode for sure.
Not knocking you but I'd love to see some research on whether this would actually be a positive for loved ones - for me, I know I'd prefer them to move on to fresher things in life.
That and the Black Mirror episode another commentor mentioned.
Straight out of the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back[0] which is 7 years old.
[SPOILERS] In the episode the episode, the main character uses a service to reconstruct a chat bot (and eventually a lifelike avatar) built from her dead partner's social media history. Eventually she becomes frustrated by the lack of depth (since it's only trained on social media data, it falls into a sort of uncanny valley of comprehension and personality), but can't part with it, confining it to the attic of her home.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
Ok, but in the black mirror episode I think we should have each neuron's worth of processing done in the Cloud owned by Google. Then they shut it down.
Netflix released that Black Mirror episode that's a sort of 'choose your own adventure' game though.
Not that that necessarily makes me disagree about the effort/buy-in - I still haven't watch/played it.
Have you seen the Black Mirror episode with the Uber-esque tech company? The CEO is trying to placate a man in crisis over the phone. The CEO's support team starts feeding him via Slack de-escalation bullet points from their psychological experts. The man, bewildered and frustrated at the mechanical responses, stammers at him, "Why don't you talk like a normal fucking human being?!" The CEO then drops the "systematic" approach and talks to him like a person, from instinct, the heart, or whatever. Now you'll say that's a system too, but at some point the system is so riddled with exceptions that it becomes indistinguishable from chaos or intuition, and no longer is a useful system that can be described in any explicit way.
Embrace it. Focusing on what is inevitable isn't healthy. What we can do is develop tools that will evolve us to combat tech. Fight the tech with tech. Biotech may solve current problems forever. Gene therapy and modification is the future, probably. So you need not worry, give in your fate to the tech overlords.
Or wait until you can live with AR that is good enough to replace your actual social interaction without you developing health problems. All we need to do is create good enough replacement for humans. That is the problem with current social platforms. They are too static. They fail and result in uncanny communication. They aren't able to convey body language, emotions and many other details that actual humans give off.
plays black mirror episode
I am waiting for my robot partner because everyone else in my life just sucks and I can't relate to any of them. Internet provides you power to embrace different culture and world than the one you live in, and sometimes it creates in inevitable environmental and cultural dissonance where you are nothing like anyone else you know. Well, that explains my internet addiction at least.
Where else do you think am I going to find buddies to talk about free software, anime, startups and odd bizarre stuff?
Post is meant to be satirical.
Black Mirror writers: please turn this into an episode.
... which seems like a good premise for a Black Mirror episode!
What's being proposed is more like that episode of Black Mirror where the mother gets her daughter a brain implant that makes her unable to perceive anything "objectionable" (anything that raises heart rate or upsets her in any way).
Spam/Not Spam is a very limited category to filter. "Things I Like / Things I Don't Like" is very different. Sometimes you need to know about things you don't like.
Suppose everyone who doesn't want to act on climate change just filters out any information related to climate change. Do you think that is helpful for the world?
For the Black Mirror fans, Charlie talks about using Twine to help write Bandersnatch in this interview: https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-bandersnatch-interactive-episode/.
Of course it can lead to a culture of horrors. That's my exact point! Revolutions are very scary things.
Black mirror episodes, some of them are very dead on and immediately relevant.
Sounds like the episode of Black Mirror "Be Right Back":
> The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly decides to try it.
I've listened to the previous episodes when they were released initially last year. The promise of The Program sounded intriguing: set in a (dystopian?) future, narrated by ordinary people, often in an interview style, so I as a listener was (and still am) unaware of the full setting. And then the series took a break for about a year, but is now finally back. Finally!
The previous episode was as good as expected, and I can't wait to listen to the latest one. It's a bit sad that I work from home, I'd love to have to commute tomorrow so I could listen to it on the train...
The ideas, the writing, the chosen music, and especially the production quality is top notch. I don't know how he does it or where he's got his budget from, but this sounds better and more professional than almost all other podcasts, totally on par (or even better) with content produced by BBC etc.
If Black Mirror went back to its pre-Netflix roots and had an audio version, THIS would be it!
I think there is a Russian Black Mirror reboot where this is the premise of the first episode.
Then the dogs turn on their handlers ... and you have the makings of a Black Mirror episode.
Yeah, I know more about my compatibility with someone after talking with them for a few minutes that I do from reading a perfect list of their interests and opinions.
It's why we date instead of picking our spouse from an Excel spreadsheet.
Dating apps cannot fix this, but they can make it easier to meet more people.
I thought a great take on this was the Black Mirror episode where your dating-app compatibility score with someone was the percentage of times your virtual clone escapes the simulation with them. How else can you predict chemistry?
Hah, just like in that Black Mirror episode, where the main character avoids interacting with the waiter with a 3.x rating for fear of being judged by others as someone of lower status (score).
Alain de Botton has an illuminating documentary about status (2h30m version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g, 5m version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iipn6yM43sM)
I can't get behind "looking down" at scifi, but the distinction between scifi and speculative fiction isn't necessarily pedantic. Speculative fiction creates a world sufficiently different from our own that we need to situate to it, which makes it similar to science fiction. But in terms of technology, everything matches what we have right now.
As long as you don't disparage a particular genre, it's an entertaining and thought provoking distinction, especially when you get right out on the line. For instance, the episode of Black Mirror "Nosedive" gets right out on that line. There isn't much technology that doesn't already exist, they've just gone a little farther with it in terms of electric cars. Then you could go in the other direction - all fiction is speculative to some extent, so when does it cross the line? I'd say it happens when you need to situate yourself to the rules of a very different world, in a broad sense, but very hard to say...
The Handmaid's Tale feels like science fiction to me, probably because it's in a vague future date. But I'm having trouble thinking of anything technology oriented that would have to exist and doesn't already.
It reminds me of the robot dogs from the Black Mirror episode Metalhead.
Like in that episode of Black Mirror with the bikes and American Idol! Our entire existence can be ad supported with cameras making sure we’re watching.
> Sounds like the start of a truly horrifying Black Mirror episode
That episode already exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ
> Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work.
Sounds like the start of a truly horrifying Black Mirror episode
There was also a Black Mirror episode.
Have you seen the “Black Museum” episode of Black Mirror?
Reminds me the Crocodile episode from Black Mirror:
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/29/16808458/black-mirror-crocodile-recap-season-4-review
Sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode.
Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror
Trust me, in 20-30 years, after the apocalypse, someone needs to turn on a water filter and npm can't download the correct package... and they die of dehydration... just write the Black Mirror episode around it!
Compelling. I wonder what else this could be applied to in addition to psychedelics? Anti-anxiety and other sensory affecting drugs?
If you wanna get Black Mirror-esque, perhaps a Soma-like medication from Brave New World (essentially pacifies/zombifies you by creating endless bliss) could be made. Or the "bliss" drug episode of Doctor Who.
> TV-embraces-criticism-and-makes-it-the-new-normal
That was the most chilling and realistic part of the black mirror episode from the first season... where the guy goes on this passionate rant against the reality show culture... and the reality show responds by saying how much they love that fire and passion, so they give him a reality show.
Haha, no problem, but it's mostly just practice. The key thing seems to be recognizing that there's anything worth picking out in a piece of art to begin with—those with little practice don't notice it anywhere, or else will see it everywhere because of course it's possible to bullshit deep themes into an average episode of NCIS if you're so inclined—then questioning why for various decisions. If you're not sure what something means in a thematic or thesis sense, look at which possibility or possibilities go best with the rest of what you've seen (or read, or heard—works for books and music, too).
FWIW I find most of the rest of Black Mirror a lot less rich than Fifteen Million Merits, though I like most of it. I couldn't write as much on most of the episodes as that one, because I'm just not sure there's as much there. Most are a fairly straight route up to usually some kind of twist, with a little worth saying about the relation of the twist to the rest but mostly what they're up to is pretty on the surface. Nothing wrong with that, and that fact that it consistently tries to say anything at all puts it above most TV, so far as that goes.
To expand a little into other episodes, though, to give some more idea of what I mean by asking why about choices creators make in art: take The National Anthem, for example. When a Certain Pivotal Scene (you know the one) happens, the creators could have depicted it several ways without changing the actual story. A few possibilities: 1) actually show it, entirely, 2) show it but crop out the worst of it, 3) keep the camera nearby, say on people in the room or in the next room over, or on the fictional production crew "shooting" the event, 4) any of the above but show only a little and cut away, 5) just skip straight to after, don't have any footage that takes place during it at all, among other options. There was a choice to make, and the one that was made isn't exactly revolutionary, but also isn't one of the most obvious ones: keep the camera going for all of it (or maybe just most? I can't recall for sure) after showing us every moment at the scene of the event leading up to it, but only show the faces of people watching it on TV. Why? It wasn't the only way they could have avoided putting the event itself onscreen, why do it that way?
Showing people watching a screen, especially something sensational that's been teased from the very first scene of the episode, and holding the camera on it that long does a couple things, I think: in the general case, it invites identity with or comparison between the real life viewer and the viewer in the show; in this particular case, I think the show is also delivering on a kind of implicit promise of horrible spectacle by showing us the most disgusting thing that's happening in that moment, by the creator's judgement. Anyone watching the show, even if they hope the event won't happen or that it won't be depicted at all if it does (which is hopefully most people?) was still held in suspense and to some degree entertained by that will they/won't they dynamic. The result is that this choice both casts judgement on the viewers-in-the-show and prevents the real-life show watcher from casting them as Other and distancing themselves from those voyeurs. This option was chosen by the show's creators because it conveys a message different from what others would have (most of the other options above wouldn't convey much at all, without some further effort, but would advance the plot just the same) and does so effectively. That single choice causes multiple effects on and messages to the viewer, working toward one end.
To take that a step further, both reinforcing the likelihood that this was intentional and possibly adding insight into other episodes, the show repeatedly returns to themes along these lines, of the viewer-as-complicit. White Bear's a huge one, obviously, featuring punishment essentially for the act of watching a crime (and filming! The show also loves to jab at itself and its creators pretty viciously, as Fifteen Million Merits manages to also do in addition to everything else) with a kind of Greek hell of... having crimes done to them while "normal people" watch and record, which is called justice. A couple others tread similar ground—Shut Up and Dance, notably.
Moving into more tenuous territory: Jan Junipero may also be doing something like this, forcing the viewer into more direct confrontation with some message in it by identifying them with some element of or character in the show, at the end, just a bit. The long sequence of server farms and robot arms at the end definitely adds a sense of melancholy and unease over the happy ending and neatly reframes our own emotions about the episode, which is probably the main thing it's intended to do, but that also looks an awful lot like any modern-day server farm. Like where Netflix episodes come from. Like the episode you just watched, finding temporary joy in this fiction while sitting, apparently lifeless... and oh look it's suggesting another show or movie, how nice, this could just go on forever, couldn't it? And that's the season Black Mirror transitioned to Netflix, I'm pretty sure.
That's quite stretch from the pretty clear use of those themes and mechanisms in other episodes and I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near as sure of it as some of the other stuff, since it's pretty abstract and there are other, stronger ways to explain why the scene is there and why it looks the way it does... but then again Bandersnatch came out a few years later and hits some of the same notes explicitly, which makes it just a tad less likely that that wasn't on the creators' minds when they decided how the end of San Junipero should go, and a little more likely that that connection was intended.
Right. It's like the slow march towards the future from the fifteen million merits episode of black mirror.
American films often use military assets and personal, and give the military final cut on the films. They follow rules set by the navy, Air Force, etc to portray their personnel and decision making in a certain, glorifying way. This program has been rampant in US film, but it's arguably increased in it's offerings to film makers; more money, more sets, more extras--and more demands. Film franchises work with U.S. forces to produce recruitment material using the film's IP, story, actors and brand.
Black Mirror, from memory, season 3 episode 5(?), a soldier fights a non-human enemy that is simply hiding from them. [Spoiler ahead] Turns out, military manipulation of the soldier's brain causes him to see non-humans where there are actually helpless humans.
Independence Day 2 lent their story, one of fighting alien invasion, to US armed forces recruitment videos. Actors gave mock interviews about their brave children who fought the aliens, and viewers were encouraged to join the REAL armed forces to be like the fictional ones fighting the fictional enemy.
This scratches the surface of what I mean to compare Cook's alleged requests to. Apple, without military money, asked writers to be sensitive of another nation. Their motive: a wider audience and more subscribers and customers. Heinous and selfish--sure, why not--but a far cry from recruiting folks to dump napalm on villages or use Iraqi farmers as target practice.
As a freaking media company, producers and other executives ask for content and define the market in which they want to address. It sounds like that's all Apple's really done. And if they've actually made an effort to curb US propaganda about China, then, even better. But I think it's more about expanding to a very promising market.
We should think about what is going to happen to all those people (let's face it, the vast majority) who are not passionate about anything... Or worse; who are simply not quite passionate enough...
Taking into account a competitive global environment with many traditional/productive jobs disappearing and being replaced by a much smaller number of extremely hard-to-get content creator jobs, I don't think it's going to end well. It's starting to look like that Black Mirror episode where people end up living in a box and generaring electricity with their legs.
I wasn’t as impressed by the remake, thought it was pretty obvious the writers ran out of source material after the first season. It’s one of those stories that would have worked as an episode of Black Mirror, and you could stretch it out to a movie format, but don’t think it lends itself multiple seasons of hour long episodes. Remember the 70s tv spinoff Beyond Westworld? Don’t feel bad if you don’t.
If you mean the TV series, it's:
The 'black mirror' of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror
Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.
It basically looks like an intro to a Black Mirror episode...
Isn't that the question posed by Black Mirror's Waldo episode?
> do people really look at Black Mirror episodes and walk away thinking, "that might be a really good idea."?
Apparently at least one person did.
But... isn't the entire point of White Christmas that this technology has horrifying social consequences?
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but do people really look at Black Mirror episodes and walk away thinking, "that might be a really good idea."?
I think that's the plot of that Black Mirror episode, Be Right Back.
Black Mirror covered something a few steps beyond this in the episode called “San Junipero” [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero
There's a black mirror episode based on this.
Makes me think of a Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Really creepy stuff ...
Are you saying Netflix hasn’t made quality shows that will last through 2039? I’d like to know which company you think has made close to the amount of quality shows Netflix has since 2014. Here’s part of a list I have for a content project. No company comes close to this output in recent history.
House of Cards launched February 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Orange is the New Black launched July 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Stranger Things launched July 2016 (3 seasons, 1-2 more)
—
Dark (2 seasons, 3rd is last)
Glitch (2 seasons, 3rd might never come)
Russian Doll (1 season)
Haunting of Hill House (1 season, anthology)
American Vandal (2 seasons)
Black Mirror (anthology, last season not that good)
The Crown (3 seasons)
When They See Us (mini-series, 2019)
Unbelievable (just came out)
—
Glow (3 seasons)
Kimmy Schmidt (4 seasons, finished)
Arrested Development (they tried, hard to get it all back together after years of being done)
Sex Education (1 season)
Bojack Horseman (5 seasons?) #animated
Mindhunter (2 seasons)
The OA (2 seasons)
Maniac (mini-series)
Wet Hot American Summer (2 seasons, but season 1 is the top notch one)
F is for Family (3? seasons) #animated
Big Mouth (2? seasons) #animated
—
Documentary mini-series
—
Staircase
Making a Murderer
Evil Genius
The Jinx
Wild Wild West
——-
There’s more I’m missing and I didn’t include a number of shows Netflix helps finance but isn’t the main financier or producer or original place of distribution. Shows like Glitch.
This type of life sounds like only a few steps away from a Black Mirror episode
I used to take down pedofile rings online with a few associates. This was strictly a black hat endeavor and I never had to look at anything. My motivation was that its fun to use these skills to ruin someones day (or life in this case) but it's only really moral to do these sort of things against people like that.
I once found a confirmed child porn possessing target with a smart home I was able to access. That guy must of thought he was in a black mirror episode.
That video looks like the intro of a Black Mirror episode.
> Most shareholders now, in terms of percentage of voting stock ownership, are not individuals but mutual funds, who don't care what the corporation's goals are as long as its stock price and dividends meet targets; and CEOs, even if their share holdings are small as a percentage of the total, can easily get themselves special compensation packages and golden parachutes regardless of whether they improve the corporation's situation or not.
You stopped just short of what I think is the real issue here. Corporations these days are simply “financial paperclip maximizers”: amoral entities that do whatever is profitable, consequences beyond the bottom line be damned. There’s literally an episode of Black Mirror about this.
They “privatize profits and socialize costs,” as the saying goes, and they don’t blink at doing things that may be illegal, because the profit reward is so strong.
This is the kind of thinking that had oil companies suppressing climate change research in the 80s and tobacco companies suppressing lung cancer research in the 40s and 50s. A feel good statement by a couple hundred CEOs isn’t going to do anything about that.
If you had a TV show in which the winner had their severe illness treated, it would fit right on with Black Mirror. But we're really not that far away.
This sounds like an episode of black mirror
Also the premise of a Black Mirror episode.
And soon, it will the premise of everyday life in the US. Whoopee!
well, black mirror ( the TV series ) has played with this topic. It has already played out in some ways where there's been stories of people being manipulated because they get compromising video by hijacking peoples cams then they leverage that to get more. So, there is a good possibility it's playing out involving people of influence
Neurological biotech always grabs my attention. From what I put together from reading this article, a over simplified summary is that they managed to put a device into a mouse's brain that can reciprocate cartridges of a drug, which is then remotely administored. When it comes to this field this is the kind of thing I see in the near future panning out. I know there is a lot of advancement in the 'brain to computer interface' area of biotech, the sort of technology a Black Mirror episode may be based on, but in my incredibly ignorant opinion this is the sort of technology that'll come to fruition in the near future for this field. Rereading this post, maybe the two are incredibly unrelated, but I'll stand by my statement that this path is much more feasible than other recent news about the field. I'm interested to hear others thoughts
I had a sci-fi-plot idea while swatting my nth mosquito on a camping trip last month.
What if we figured out how to repurpose mosquitos to deliver useful viruses instead of harmful ones? Just think about it: no more scheduling appointments for vaccines or flu shots, simply wait outside for 20 minutes in the summer, and before you know it you’re immunized against malaria, measles, etc.
Not being a biologist, I have no idea if this is a plausible scenario, but I hope that somebody investigates it! It might be a very cost-effective and democratic method of delivering care.
At the very least it’d make for a good black mirror episode :)
This is straight out of a Black Mirror episode.
This sounds like the setup for a Black Mirror episode.
People have been saying this for about 35 years. Back in the 80s Imagine hyped two games called Psyclapse and Bandersnatch saying they were groundbreaking, huge, and really expensive to make. They were never released and stories of the devs working long hours and sleeping under desks came out. There have been similar games and stories every year since then.
The story of the Bandersnatch game is the basis of the Black Mirror episode of the same name. The writer, Charlie Brooker, is a big gaming fan.
The article viewpoints are probably right, Netflix and Amazon need a few more hits that people trust.
The Office was a big fallback show and Netflix needs a few of those of their own. Stranger Things probably fits that.
The Witcher might change things for quality on Netflix.
Netflix shows have high production quality in terms of cinematography, lighting, sound, color, sets, on location etc. Writing and big draw actors aren't there just yet, though they have a bunch of that going and started that way with House of Cards. Stranger Things was new actors except a couple like Winona Ryder, the writing was better and it was successful. Maniac and Sabrina are also pretty good in this area. Bojack Horseman has a cult following. Dark is amazing. Black Mirror was a great acquisition. I Am Mother was pretty good and premiering Annihilation was a steal. Russian Doll was excellent. Animation like Death, Love & Robots, Voltron, Castlevania and more are solid. Those are all the model to go for. What is missing in most shows is writing and casting/actors draw to make a staple series that becomes a fallback like the article mentions.
> Consumers turn to a trusted source when they don’t know what to watch on their streaming service
> Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon Prime offer plenty of critically-acclaimed, award-winning content. But the thing is, viewers have to pick which movies and series they’ll watch, and observers say many are getting burned out from all that decision-making.
Now with The Witcher the writing is based on a really solid book series, they have a big name actor Henry Cavill that has read the series and it looks great. It could be their Game of Thrones.
Amazon is also trying this with Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time.
These shows if they are done right, will get rewatched for a long time and draws in the mega fans that are influencers.
Netflix is doing pretty good with stand up comedy, maybe even the leader now. They paid Dave Chappelle and will forever be thanked for that by comedy content consumers.
Netflix and Amazon need some big hits like the coming epics, and they need some good staple shows like the Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 (Netflix should have bought this), Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Friends, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. When they have that they equal the content competition that has that trusted good quality. They need a few more of these always watchable fallbacks.
They are both still chasing HBO, HBO is still the top in consistently good content and shows.
Personally I love the competition, some real funding and creator freedom is being unleashed, some are big hits, some are average and some not so good, but I like the amount of content and like the vibe of where Netflix is headed. Their new intro splash where the N goes into color bands is even great, matches their really colorful catalog.
The difficulty with Netflix and the like moving to a platform with a recommendation engine, is that no matter how good the machine learning is, it will have a strong incentive(minimization function) to show cheap content. Netflix has awesome blockbusters, but you will see the Netflix label and smaller budget movies higher in your recommendations because it cuts Netflix’s cost. In other words Netflix has to pay a lot more $ per view of blockbusters from big Hollywood studios than it does for private label movies and shows.
If Netflix can have 10x the amount of private label hits like House of Cards and Black Mirror, they will do fine.
Good Example: Black Mirror episode where man has sex with his friend in Mortal Kombat. Is this really an interesting addition to the Black Mirror world? Accept gay people, alright, whatever; I still don't want to watch 2 people having VR chat sex.
Fantastic read. This would be a great Black Mirror Episode.
Is this an episode of black mirror or real life?
Same here. I find that I've turned to Youtube to satisfy any content cravings. It's not perfect, suggestions sometimes never have anything to do with what I've been watching the past 12 hours, Youtube's algorithms have a clear bias against certain content and sometimes I can't bother to wade through pages and pages of slosh to find what I know fits my tastes, but at this point I have a good idea of the search terms to use when I want something to watch, and if all else fails I can always just rewatch an ancient creator's old content.
Meanwhile on Netflix, it is nearly impossible to find what interests me by just turning it on and flipping through the initial feed. It also feels like there is never enough of the content I want to watch. I found 'Kingdom', 'Love,Death and Robots' and 'Sex Education' completely by accident, and on ending each series and falling in love with their concepts, I get exhausted when I see there is no season 2, because it means it will probably be a while until I hit the jackpot again. Even one of my favorites - 'Black Mirror', seems to be dropping in quality.
I haven't opened Netflix in 2 months and probably will cancel my sub soon because the wait it just not worth the price.
I’m a Netflix investor. I’ve posted my tech portfolio here before, Netflix was a big part of it.
Not anymore. I’ve decided to sell off in the after hours and be content with my 25%+ gain before things get worse. Or better. I don’t care.
I’ve had a bad feeling about NFLX for some time, but this earnings only confirmed it. And if they’re counting on a Stranger Things, they’re screwed. I felt season 3 was garbage, and so do many other people, the latest season of Black Mirror was also terrible. There’s just nothing here for me anymore, and because of that I can’t sleep soundly being invested in this company.
> Its almost like one of those Black Mirror episodes
I'd always thought of Black Mirror as a warning or reminder to consider the wider consequences of technology. Not as a motivator to develop it faster.
The thought of this kind of technology (no matter how far away it really is from being deployed) terrifies me. I certainly do not trust someone like Elon Musk to develop it responsibly and pause to consider what it will do to all of humanity. That's what is at stake here, the definition of humanity, for better and worse.
I'm certainly not the only one to think of this.
I know of Twilight Zone episodes to have used that. Specifically one I can think of is the Dachau Nazi "doctor" comes back to relive his glory days, and is forced by the ghosts who still live there to forcefully feel their pain for the rest of his life. It's supernatural, but still the same idea.
There were also episodes of Outer Limits that did similar, but with a machine that forced them to live with the crime they committed.
I believe Black Mirror also did some of this as well.
Netflix originals are hit or miss. They make (or take over) some good stuff, like Stranger Things season 1 or Bonus Family, but they also make some embarrassing, awfully bad things, like Bright or Bird Box. Even within the same show they are hit or miss, like when they took over The Killing or Black Mirror. I find there's no correlation between "made by Netflix" and quality.
Is that a reference to the Black Mirror episode?
Reminds me of the Black Mirror 'Smithereens' episode where Jack is the yoga meditating hippie, but this time he decides to finally shut it down
> It's like a startup scene but how things used to be done before YC.
Jeebus. Things aren't better or worse after YC, they're just different. YC is the same kind of content farm as Netflix. It's not that YC can't produce great startups, it's that so many "dumb money" investors rely heavily on YC as an initial signal that it's (1) more difficult to succeed if you're not YC and (2) if you are YC and fail (statistically likely), you are blackmarked in a pretty terrible way. Many businesses take multiple iterations to succeed.
YC was great when it had 30 great founders in the same way Netflix was great when it first aired Black Mirror. We have to find more robust funding models for promising teams (in all verticals) that don't get compromised by immediate cashflow requirements. Or else we end up with a Miley Cyrus Disney-Ending Black Mirror episode that... we... liked... but what happened to the dystopian horrors we thought we were paying for?
Good point & totally agreed about popularity. People may want to see a TV show because someone popular is acting in it (using the Black Mirror example, Miley Cyrus was in an episode of the last season).
I guess the question is: what value is popularity? If Miley Cyruses increase in cost doesn't warrant the increase in revenue, then it's not worth it. If it does then it is. It sounds like the market is re-calibrating a little.
> If I am going to spend 1 hour watching basketball, I am going to want to watch Lebron James.
That's an excellent point.
- Is acting ability as unevenly distributed as athletic ability?
- Would Black Mirror be better if every episode had Jodie Foster or Jake Gyllenhaal in it? Or is it possible that using less well known actors would not negatively impact viewership?
This is almost literally the premise of an actual Black Mirror episode. While I do have some nest cameras, I'm likely never going to use them to resolve a family dispute, talking works for me.
I'd also feel uneasy at normalizing such surveillance for my kids. I'd like them to be able to sort a dispute without recourse to a video that won't always be there. Family disputes can often have an emotional dimension too, one that simply playing back a cold video account of the event won't resolve.
I just had to point out that a similar idea was incorporated in the second episode of Black Mirror. It's one of my favorite shows, don't know if you're a fan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Could be the starting plot of an amazing "Black Mirror" episode!
This recalls the Black Mirror episode Crocodile, where smell is used to jog memories. That was one of the less realistic ones.
Sounds like a perfect pitch for a Black Mirror episode. Although "Fifteen Million Merits" gets kinda close.
Thoroughly agree, though don't forget White Christmas - the special was great too!
Netflix brought larger budgets, no impact any more and 15 minutes extra to explain points over, and over, and over. Like Nosedive. The extra 15 minutes was entirely devoted to "have interaction, rate it". Two or three explanations of this difficult concept would have been plenty. San Junipero was more Disney than Black Mirror.
Even the better Netflix episodes feel like they are pulling their punches.
season 1 ep 1 was the episode where the PM porks the pig. People remember it because it became shockingly relevant.
IMO seasons 1 and 2 were the best. Seasons 1 and 2 gave us things like the Waldo incident, which seemed to predict the rising tide of populism and data driven politics. They gave us white bear which is a brilliantly deep critique on crime and punishment in technologically advanced societies.
The worst episodes can all be summed up as "the bees". The bees episode didn't have any deep or interesting point about micro-drones. It was just bad guy does terror thing and good guy hunts him (with some fletching about social media thrown on top). Same thing with Crocodile. The idea of a memory reading device and the issues of surveillance and privacy are interesting, but that episode completely skirted giving us anything to ponder in favor of a plain old cops and killers story that may as well be a CSI rerun.
black mirror has two problems.
1. Netflix. 2. Charlie needs a technologist.
Before the Netflix acquisition the ending was usually dark or uncomfortable. Each episode was like we had wished for some technology on a monkey's paw and got it. After Netflix came along it seemed like a rule that half the episodes had to end at least bitter sweet. I think they might be executive meddling with the formula. Perhaps Charlie could do a "screw you" episode about how a data driven TV production company leads to a world of incredibly bland art.
Charlie Brooker is a journalist / comedian. After visiting the well of "social media kind of sucks" 3 or 4 times, he's clearly running out of ideas. He needs to work with someone more up to date on the trends.
I found this entire season to be sophomoric. A lot of the previous episodes were dense in subject matter that's not too often explored; the subject matter in this season has all been going on for the past decade or two and you would have to have not been paying any attention to the news while maintaining absolutely no interest in transgender topics for this to be meaningful.
!!!!!! SPOILERS FOLLOW !!!!!!
Episode 1 - "a guy explores his gender in a video game and finds that he enjoys a gender different than the one he's playing in real life. His friend finds that he enjoys his friend in that gender despite not being gay."
Big deal? People have been doing this in real life without the aid of video games for decades now.
Episode 2 - "a guy gets addicted to social media and (potentially) kills his significant other because he was paying attention to his social media while driving. He coerces the CEO of said social media into talking to him, CEO pays him some lip service after "triangulating" who this guy is through minimal information. Guy dies. Life goes on."
I mean what's surprising here? Who hasn't looked up a blind date with Google to figure out whether or not they're a psycho? Laymen already have this information easily accessible to them. I've done a background check on myself, out of curiosity, and I found my address, phone number and email by just looking up the city I'm from and my name. Social media profiles are even easier to find.
Or was it the fact that the CEO paid convincing lip service to some guy and then doesn't follow through with it?
Or was it that life goes on after you die? Big whoop?
Episode 3 - I mean why bother, it was just another feel good episode on a topic black mirror already explored.
Unfortunately I did not find that episode of Black Mirror interesting.
If you found this article or the idea interesting, be sure to check out one of the latest episodes [1] of Black Mirror.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8758202/?ref_=ttep_ep2
>In the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang, Western news articles reported that a hidden camera was placed to catch citizens with improper hairstyles. This was part of a television programme broadcast at the same time as Let's Trim Our Hair in Accordance with the Socialist Lifestyle. The offenders would then be interviewed by the presenter and asked to explain themselves. Their name, address and workplace would be announced to deter others from being embarrassed and ostracized.
This could be a Black Mirror episode.
This seems like a future Black Mirror episode.
> When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same.
Spoiler warning for a season 1 episode of Black Mirror: this is precisely the gut-punch realization delivered at the end of the "future" "sci-fi" episode Fifteen Million Merits. It is set in the future, and it is sci-fi, but it is not at all about the future or about sci-fi—it's entirely about now. A horrible, pointless, sterile existence—but where are the enforcers, if this is some kind of dystopia? Robot drones, cyborg lackeys of the system packing heat, sadistic future-cops? There are none. Not a single one. Perhaps the outside world was ruined so there's no escape? Oh, but no, it wasn't. It's right there. The episode's given us no reason to believe anyone who wanted to couldn't walk right out into it. But they don't. And neither do we (mostly).
There was an early Black Mirror episode exploring exactly this scenario. The social consequences are frightening.
Season 6 black mirror pitch idea right here
I watched this last night. No spoilers.
What was ammusing was all the talk in the episode about how everything online was optimized to keep users addicted, and when the episode ended, the next Black Mirror episode started 4 seconds later, as of course Netflix wants to desperately keep your attention.
This is really intriguing to think about, black mirror season 6? (Haven't watched 5 yet, no spoilers)
Even if one claims the video is fine (and I'd disagree), it's still a very very very bad idea for Amazon, or any large company, to be enforcing the law and conducting mass shaming via advertising.
That's practically a Black Mirror episode, and I would hope that everyone can see this, but judging from this comment thread, that's clearly not the case. Disturbing.
All the web sites that go with British newspapers (and for all I know, other newspapers in the world, but I live in Britain) have been doing grey-SEO stuff that's bound to get hit by algorithm changes.
By "grey SEO" here I'm thinking of articles that are intended to get "natural" traffic as a result of people asking questions, e.g.
"When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?"
An encyclopedia is often the natural result for questions like these, or some sort of specialist fact database, IMDB for example, or a TV channel's own listings site. But the newspapers decided they could get some of those clicks. If some people who were wondering if that's the same girl in Godzilla (yup) click through and see four adverts and read speculation as to whether Kate Middleton hates her brother-in-law's new wife (probably not, also who cares?) that's more profit for the publisher.
Anyway, Google's thing has always been trying to put the answers you wanted at the top. In defiance of Babbage's oft-cited remark, Google wants to give you the answer you were looking for even if you ask the wrong question. This may often mean that a Daily Mail article trying to get you to click through to more slop about nothing is NOT the best answer when you asked a mundane question and Google may tweak their algorithm to prefer say, the Netflix video trailer for this season of Black Mirror, higher than a Daily Mail article speculating that Charlie Brooker might be gay when users ask it "When is Black Mirror new series?" even if the Daily Mail team worked really hard setting metadata tags and fiddling with the layout.
The female version of this taken even further is pretty much literally a Black Mirror episode. Season 2 Episode 1
Black Mirror did an episode based on this concept (Be Right Back)
So many comments in this thread I can't tell if they're satirical or not - I feel like that episode of Black Mirror has less obviously outrageous statements than this thread.
I think this goes to show the unintended negative consequences that can apply when you take a generally good idea and start applying a "false precision" rating system to it - Goodhart's law and all that.
It sounds like satire, reminds me of the Black Mirror episode.
This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode....
Same here. I find myself going from series to series trying to find something that captivates me, and nothing sticks. I thought I was goingd to watch more Netflix now that Thrones is over but it is the opposite. I expect more and Netflix isnt delivering so I will cancel my subscription soo .
A 5-episode series of Black Mirror every year isnt going to cut it. I honestly dont know why they dont release an episode a week. Its pure laziness on their part, imo. Make the consumers happy. stop pushing out random junk that doesn’t stick and double down on what works.
> I was both pleased and chagrined by the irony of the fact that my anti-social-media talk had found such a large audience on social media.
This immediately reminds me of the "Fifteen Million Merits" episode of Black Mirror.
> As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for some people, is that these things show very openly how democracy is deeply flawed.
If you study a bit of History, or look beyond the western world, you will see how terrible the alternatives are. And you will see that democracy is something worth fighting for. Democracy is not flawed, it is hard. We have to fight for it, and the next generations will have to fight for it, and so on. It's real life.
I haven't resigned myself to living in a Black Mirror episode.
Ok I'll say it...this is like that Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
There was a great Black Mirror episode[1] about this concept, highly recommend. Obvious spoiler warning in the wiki page.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
I have a feeling such privacy-conscious decisions will eventually have consequences, akin to the social-ranking systems from that episode of Black Mirror, or in China[0], where in both instances various forms of punishment are dealt to those not contributing "positive" data to the cloud.
It seems like there aren't very many people who really care about privacy... and they would be easy to single out and punish.
On that note, enjoy your semblance of privacy now... while you still can!
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.de/video-china-train-warns-citizens-to-behave-for-social-credit-system-2018-10?r=US&IR=T
Black Mirror's Nosedive episode did up all the sets, scenery, costumes, and makeup as one gigantic Instagram post.
Yet another Black Mirror episode proven prophetic.
If I remember correctly, season 1, episode 3 "The Entire History of You" depicted a world where most people had eye and ear implants that recorded everything they saw and heard. When one of the characters who did not have the implant called the police to ask for help as she watched her boyfriend being beaten up, the cop requested to to be given access to her implant. When she said she did not have one, they simply hanged up on her.
And now, less than 8 years later, here we are.
An interesting thought, probably best left explored by a future episode of Black Mirror.
Though the prospect of social media networks bidding for your digital soul after death, does bemuse me.
There’s a much worse version of this in an episode of Black Mirror.
There's an entire episode of Black Mirror devoted to exploring a dark potential future of this sort of thing:
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/29/16791518/black-mirror-arkangel-recap-season-4-review
A whole neighborhood run by Google? That's even more dystonian than many Black Mirror episodes.
> (If they're explicitly trying to cause me pain, that would be a no.)
That is my point.
I imagine that, if this was a possibility, quite a lot of people would be ok (or even demand it) to make available "150 years after natural death" sentences, so that they can apply it to their newly deposed dictator. Then, once the new rulers become entrenched in power and begin to like it, they can start using it on their political opponents. Prisoner exchanges between warring countries could become quite interesting. Quite likely, some people might feel inclined to hang on to their loved ones forever. Remember Terri Schiavo [1]?
Feel free to imagine more interesting scenarios. If you don't start to shudder, you're just not thinking big enough. You can watch this Black Mirror episode [2] to get you started.
This gives a whole new meaning to the expression "killer application".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5058700/
A Black Mirror episode considers a flip side of that coin: the threat of PTSD as a blackmail device. Granted, alongside some other far-fetched circumstances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
https://github.com/Pradyuman7/LookAtMe/issues/3
Oh, so like that episode of Black Mirror? (S01E02) Kind of scary.
This sounds a lot like a Black Mirror episode, except in that episode the characters were actually simulated AIs I believe.
This is the premise of one of the short stories in Black Mirror's "Black Museum" episode (written by Penn Jillette, actually). A doctor uses it as a diagnostic device and then, as you might expect, the plot turns dark. It's very well done.
“Why spend your time being nice to an old person uncompensated“
Sometimes I wish that Black mirror episode where you got reputation points for doing good deeds became real.
Reminds me of the first episode of Black Mirror, when the British PM is preparing for his act with the pig, his aides try to calm him by saying that the parliament have just passed a law that prohibits the possession of the material that’s about to be broadcasted.
lol, no. I think you just invented the black mirror 15 million merits episode.
It's part of his PR campaign. His political team and the PR firms he hired probably did a lot of research and polling and decided this was a great way to appeal to younger voters.
Politics is all about image and appeal. And it's not just Beto. Every politician from Trump to Beto plays this game. People vote on their image of you rather than who you really are. I think Black Mirror had a great episode on how image and messaging defines a political campaign.
> What's interesting is that Real Life is highly critical about technology, while you would expect based on the funding a sort of think tank creating pro-tech fluff pieces.
It's not an uncommon case. Black Mirror even lampooned it back in its second episode (Fifteen Million Merits).
>WRT Netflix, their stated strategy was that their access to data was going to allow them to create superior content
I would argue that Netflix has and does do this except for a different definition of superior. They aren't really trying to make a single show with broad market appeal. An algorithm isn't going to help with that anyway. What an algorithm can do is find niches to serve. Netflix has done a good job of creating these smaller shows that have an intense appeal to a small number of people. Gather enough of those shows together and eventually you have everyone covered. It is basically just targeted advertising except with TV shows.
HBO might have GOT that everyone watches, but Netflix has Black Mirror, BoJack Horseman, GLOW, You, The Crown, Russian Doll, Narcos, Maniac, Ozark, One Day At A Time, Big Mouth, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and numerous other shows that have received critical acclaim and everyone probably watches at least one of those.
Please finish that story! It sounds really good, reminds me of a Black Mirror episode.
The fact that it disturbs you so much is indicative of its value, I think. A lot of people were disturbed by the first Black Mirror episode, but I think it had less to do with the inherently disgusting conceit and more to do with how undeniably realistically events unfolded. It disturbed us because it shone a light on an aspect of our being that should disturb us, and we'd otherwise be content to ignore.
Sounds like a black mirror episode? Maybe submit it?
> Let alone in connection with Bandersnatch, which was mediocre at best.
Yeah, that one was an odd connection for me. Interactivity does change the experience of narrative media, as has been obvious to anyone playing video games for a good long while now, but it's a weird way to work one's way up to where the article takes it.
To the extent that one's empathy wanes in Bandersnatch I think it's mostly down to
(1) seeing the scaffolding behind the scenes and wanting to explore, at which point the narrative loses its power and it becomes more about poking around the various branching paths, and
(2) the limitation of choice itself as meta-level control of the viewer—those "oh god I don't want to do either thing to this person" choices are the part where the episode actually has something to say. Maybe not anything new or profound (done to death in video games, which have mined the meta-territory of player choice in narrative for years) but at least something. To me this is the part—the "wait can I do neither? Oh. I'm under control too." that elevates the episode to Black Mirror level rather than just being an interesting tech experiment. The little "ah ha".
The second part is why it's pretty easy to get into the groove of just poking around without feeling anything for the characters. It's the limitation of your choices and the high visibility of the system behind them that kills the empathy. Again, territory video games have played around in for a good long while. It's a hell of a lot harder for me to play the "bad" route(s) in some video games than others, depending on how they're structured and how good the narrative and characters are. Often I can't do it and still enjoy myself. What's interesting here is why Bandersnatch in particular isn't great at maintaining viewer/player empathy—which is likely, at least in part, intentional.
I am pretty sure the Black Mirror anthology on Netflix had an episode with the exact situation.
I can recommend this recent podcast episode on coding for the ZX Spectrum - in this instance commissioned by the authors of Black Mirror. https://hanselminutes.com/670/coding-for-the-zx-spectrum-and-netflixblack-mirrors-bandersnach-with-matt-westcott
I saw this linked in an article about the number of people that were prevented from buying tickets because of their social credit score.
When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it was real. I had always thought this kind of site could be something China is heading towards but not a point they are at right now. It also looks like something that could be taken straight out of Black Mirror episode.
Thanks. I'll listen to it after work.
It's hard to find first hand info on this, rather than tons of internet people assuming it's the Black Mirror episode come to life.
Just wait until they start adding cameras that detect whether you're actually looking at the commercial or not, and pause the commercial when you're not paying attention.
I'd link to the relevant Black Mirror episode, but I'm sure we've all seen it.
Any Black Mirror episode writers here?
This just reminds me of the black mirror episode, it just feels weird to see it in action here. I still can't think of a replacement tho, given what they are trying to achieve here
When you say "just livestream footage" do you mean it's actually unedited? I'd expect that to be a painful watch in most cases and not terribly informative.
But the problem is once you edit, you unavoidably set a narrative by that process. Charlie Brooker (now most noted for "Black Mirror") years ago did a show "Screenwipe" which was a mixture of review show and factual pieces about how TV is made. One of the examples he shows is they got a bunch of people and shot "livestream footage" of them interacting, and then they took that one set of footage and re-edited it to produce different narratives. All the narratives seem like coherent understandings of things that actually happened - there is video footage after all, but all of the narratives are contrived in the edit suite and don't reflect reality. That's how "Reality Television" is made and it would apply to documentary footage - if it's edited, which it will be unless you're making slow TV (e.g. 4 hours of a man painting a wall or a woman knitting a scarf).
The vibe you're talking about, in which an interview subject believes they were truthfully represented but an audience is horrified, is basically the MO of another UK TV presenter, Louis Theroux. But Theroux would never pretend the edit suite doesn't give him the power to choose a narrative.
This reminds me of that black mirror episode where blocking someone in real life blurred their faces in pictures and memory. Doesn't seem like a very helpful thing to me. Sure it's hard looking at pictures and having those memories, but, if there's pictures, there was probably at least some good memories. I always just try and focus on those while looking at such pictures. Shit happens, good and bad, editing pictures(or altering memories) doesn't change this. It might suck that pictures can bring up bad memories but removing the person from them won't change your memories and I doubt it'll make you forget you were there with that person.
Brings to mind the series 1 second episode of Black Mirror.
Sounds like most episodes of Black Mirror. And they certainly offer cleaner and more convenient futures, just the opposite of utopian in concept and in tone.
That is also something I have wondered about and I think that’s a great idea.
One could also base it off the Maslow pyramid for multiple currencies.
There are many possibilities. We don’t have to stick to this system of money/currency.
Being healthy..being a ‘good’(in as far as there is a community prescribed moral code one is following), being educated..being young/not old are also attributes. But this would shake the notion of fairness and it might smack of discrimination. I have to think about that.
For example, if your parent had accumulated good reputation, can you inherit it?
I am also aware that this kind of system is closer to what the Chinese have implemented in a bizarre ‘life imitating art’ parody of that episode of Black Mirror with their social credit experiment. So yea..
Reminds me of that black mirror episode where you had to pay to mute commercials.
I don't get it. What you wrote and what you're responding to are not in contradiction with one another. On what basis is what GP said a lie? What relevance does 5G have to anything?
Progress in technology is progress regardless.
I just watched a few episodes of Black Mirror so I'm in cynical mode. I'm not trying to be argumentative but it just felt more like a non-sequitur than anything...
Progress is good (mostly), though, right?
As for which economies that progress happens to bolster, well, let the chips fall where they may, I suppose.
Interesting and good to learn about this real problem. The show had me really on edge (like all black mirror content) until they kind of broke the 4th (5th wall?) with the netflix thing at the end. Watching this guy talk to his therapist because he was being controlled by netflix was friggen hilarious to me...
I think i have felt this way at time, usually when really high. The whole LSD trip with colin in particular.. I liked that rant, the multiple realities, the time is a flat circle thing.
The movie hit pretty hard, good on black mirror guys for pushing boundaries of film as we know. Even some folks who dont usually get into black mirror were like, well i want to retry it and pick the different cereal to see what happens!
That's expensive if you don't watch much TV. I just watch sci-fi shows and wish I could put my money just towards those types of shows. My perfect subscription would be a mix, where I pay a small fee per month but can try out individual shows. If I like the show I'd pay for the rest of the season.
For example Amazon now has The Expanse, Starz has Counterpart, Netflix has Black Mirror and I also liked the new Lost in Space. Hulu has... Future Man? CBS All Access has... the ability to ruin Star Trek, so I might want to watch that train wreck.
Anyway if there was a cheap subscription like Amazon Prime which allowed me to try out a couple free episodes, then pay $3 per episode that would work. That way I feel like I'm supporting the specific shows I want to see.
There was a Black Mirror episode sort of like this. The person on the date wore glasses with a camera and an earpiece so the "matchmaker" could tell them what to say and do.
Netflix will probably join the videogame industry and, in a sense, has already started doing it with the interactive Black Mirror episode.
Wow, is that a thing? Reminds me of an episode from Black Mirror.
There is a black mirror episode very similar to that blackmailing.
Absolutely in agreement (although I'm on Windows). Here is my list of woes (off the top of my head):
- the supposedly intelligent AI-powered thumbnail/preview generator seems to not understand me in the slightest, often turning me off completely until I look them up on IMDB.
- replacing the 5 star rating system with a thumbs up/down... what about mediocre? Their library (in Europe) contains a huge amount of mediocre stuff.
- some Original Netflix content is only available in the US.
- the selection in Europe is very disparaging.
- after watching some movies e.g. Bandersnatch, you have 5 seconds to full-screen again before it auto-plays some other completely unrelated movie (instead of letting me enjoy the credits and accompanying music). In general I find auto-play only useful with series... although even then some series e.g. Black Mirror I really just want to listen to the great music played during the credits, and I have to scramble to find my keyboard within 5 seconds after watching a sometimes very emotional experience.
- it seems like they are primarily focused on adding series (Recently Added section is 90% series)... they seem to be opting to just fill their library with series as it gets people to keep coming back, but I actually prefer movies most of the time instead of getting sucked into another series.
- no way to disable/pause autoplay of spoiler/trailers when you initially log in, first thing I do after logging in is scroll down until it stops playing.
- sometimes they show an unavoidable/unpausable spoiler/trailer/advertisement right in the middle of the lists as you scroll down.
- why can I only create 4 profiles (and 1 kids profile)?
- I have been vocal lately and clicking the "?" button while watching a movie to leave feedback. I have yet to receive even a notification that they have at least read it, or preferably, that they might be working on any of the bugs/issues I've complained about.
- if you pause a show/movie for > 15 minutes (eg to go make popcorn, etc) and come back to it, your HD (720p of course because it's Firefox) version is replaced with a 240p/360p version, requiring a page refresh.
- no option to change resolution, my LTE modem has bad latency so Netflix auto-selects 360p for me for the first 3-5 minutes... the only solution is to refresh a few times until Netflix detects that my connection is actually sufficient to stream 720p. I was using the ctrl+alt+shift+s to manually set the resolution but they seem to have removed this a few months ago.
- native Netflix app for Windows 10 is horrendously slow and completely unusable.
- 1080p on Edge browser is not much better.
- after watching something from "My List" (where I have about 50 things saved), I have to manually go back to "My List" and find it to remove it... a button to remove it after watching would save me some trouble
- removing an item from "My List" causes the entire page to refresh and the position of everything is apparently random every time
I could definitely go on... it's a mess and it seems to be getting worse. I wonder if I'm an edge case for a lot of these issues... perhaps the general populous isn't bothered by a lot of these things? Otherwise I can't explain how they have so many top-payed engineers and how half of this shit is acceptable.
On the other hand, at least it's not as bad as Amazon Prime Video, which is an utter joke...
Netflix is already collecting a profile of every user based on what he chooses to watch. If users only watches violent series and movies, they will only get more violence in their recommendations.
Black Mirror isn't giving Netflix anything that they don't already have, but I agree that we should be worried with the overall scenario. The problem is that we aren't.
What happened with Facebook should have changed the way in which we see those big corporations that regularly register personal and behavioural data, but it didn't. Most still use Facebook, and they don't care.
It'll take much more for us to really worry.
Mad Men didn't even have an audience when it aired (<2 million viewers most episodes), and airs on a network that likely won't exist in 5-6 years (or at least won't be producing new content), so it's not super clear to me what your point is about those shows as evidence of how a network grows. The way a network grows is by producing content people want to watch, whether that's disposable content made to last a minute or content made to last the test of time. HBO isn't growing because people are subscribing to watch Sopranos re-runs.
Past reporting suggests churn in most subscription content services is very low, so your Netflix cancellation may be unusual. I'd also add that exclusive content is one part of the story, but there's also a lot of licensed content that's very good on Netflix as on other services.
But for what it is worth, I would rank the following Netflix originals to be "top tier" within their genre -- some of these genres lend themselves more to rewatching than others, and some are closer to my taste than others, some held up in quality through their run more than others, so in a sense I am ranking shows based on their peak quality --
Orange is the New Black; Bloodline; Stranger Things; The Crown; Gilmore Girls AYITL; The OA; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Mindhunter; The Haunting of Hill House; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Master of None; Love; Lady Dynamite; Santa Clarita Diet; GLOW; American Vandal; Maniac; Bojack Horseman; F is for Family; Disenchantment; Hilda; Dark; The Rain; Elite; Chef's Table; Making a Murderer; Shot in the Dark; Wormwood; Wild Wild Country; Salt Fat Acid Heat; Queer Eye; The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell; My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Lilyhammer; Terrace House; Alias Grace; The End of the Fucking World; Collateral; Wanderlust; Longmire; Black Mirror; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
In addition to these, the following shows are Netflix originals in my region, indicating that although someone else initially funded them, Netflix bought them for exclusive distribution here, and also meet the above requirements:
Babylon Berlin; Bodyguard; Casé; Crashing; Cuckoo; Derry Girls; The Great British Baking Show; Happy!; Happy Valley; The Investigator; Peaky Blinders; River.
I have pretty broad taste in TV and watch a lot of TV while I am programming or running data analysis, so maybe the breadth of stuff I include here is surprising to most. But to the extent your post is a useful anecdote about how Netflix has no great shows, I'm responding to your challenge to "Name one show" that would meet that criteria.
(These are TV shows only, not films. I haven't really liked many Netflix original films although there are a few I would say are great, like Okja and Roma)
I saw a joke on Twitter, can't remember who said it. Is Netflix's new Black Mirror Choose Your Own Adventure a movie or a game? It's a movie, you can tell because everyone involved got paid for overtime.
I can't wait until our internal email or chat flags me as depressed and I'm forced to go on leave. Can you imagine? And then I call the bank and their phone system decides I'm depressed and locks my accounts to protect me. And then the men in the white coats come. There could be a Black Mirror episode in this (if there isn't already).
I just watched a couple of Black Mirror episodes and reading this feels eerie from that perspective.
Every day it seems more and more like were living in a Black Mirror episode. How do I get off?
Also check out the brilliant Black Mirror episode 'Nosedive' on a similar theme
I found a much subtler message hidden in that episode, very similar to all the other similarly subtle messages sprinkled throughout the show.
Everybody there was acting perfectly predictably, and rationally, and the consequences for the behavior displayed were eerily similar to what they would have been without all the technological pomp.
The technology winds up simply making the normal progression of the events of life happen just a bit faster. Hard working, social people that you would expect to be successful still become successful, and entitled people like the protagonist of the episode has that entitlement drawn out far more quickly than we would ordinarily see.
There's no dystopia, just unfamiliarity with the setting that the show exploits to dramatic effect to make you think it's dystopia. But if the world of Black Mirror is dystopic, then you can level the same charge at today's technological milieu, and yesterday's, all the way back to sharpened sticks and stones. Technology doesn't destroy our humanity, it amplifies it.
Real dystopic fiction, like 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, is dystopic because it magnifies the human selfish instinct such that it turns into the villain of the story. But Black Mirror contains no grand villain, just plain old ordinary drama. The characters fight each other, not an immense system that's hellbent on destroying human dignity.
>I know it sounds Black Mirror-ish, but if it would penalize rude guys, it would be a win for everyone
You know the message of the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror was that such systems would be a dystopia rather than a “win for everyone,” right?
The episode’s point included the idea well-intentioned social system engineering can backfire, which is a well accepted trueism in the social sciences. And your refutation is basically as long as women don’t have to see anything they don’t like, it’s worth it.
It's a foolish endeavour not to believe that China is capable of identifying every single citizen based on their internet traffic.
Ad companies have already been doing it for years. As entertaining as Black Mirror is, the episode featuring just such a scenario in China of being capable linking real life identities to online and offline activities for the purposes of a dystopic and a just plain shitty world is very possible. In addition, it's incredibly likely what will happen in China with the social credit system will be much worse than anything you'd see in Black Mirror.
Imagine a world where you could curb the enthusiasm of the entire population for democratic activities or activities that run contrary to state directives. Oh, you said something bad about some mundane activity. Your phone used voice recognition technology to pass that up to the state censor bot. The punitive measures taken can then be expected to occur up to and including an obligatory re-education.
"I pledge allegiance to the great firewall of China and the government of China. I will never make disparaging remarks about any state run corporation or agency, in private and especially not in public ever again."
The State panopticon: VOICE RECOGNITION CONFIRMED SAY THREE HAIL CHINAS AND CONTINUE TO INDOCTRINATION CAMP 3 FOR FURTHER RE-EDUCATION ACTIVITIES
Netflix, Amazon and Apple are producing unique content which will ONLY be available on their respective platforms. Go look at the TV space where you can only watch Stranger Things, Black Mirror, 13 Reasons Why etc on Netflix. And they are talking about extending this to movies.
Seems pretty reasonable to me to be alarmist.
I agree with you, outside of a few productions the vast majority of netflix content isn't good. Black Mirror, Stranger Things, the new movie the Ballad of Buster Scruggs... I can't think of anything else I like from them.
Amazon has the same problem, both Amazon and Netflix seem to pump out tv shows without putting that much work into them going for quantity over quality. First Amazon show I actually enjoyed was the Jack Ryan tv show. Sneaky Pete was good for the first few episodes but it just seems to fizzle out.
In contrast, almost everything on HBO is good. I rewatched Band of Brothers for I think the 3rd time the other week and I enjoyed it just as much as I had the first time I had seen it.
> The overall social credit system is super strange to me
Spotted the person who hasn’t seen the relevant (and really awesome) Black Mirror episode.
The ending of the Black Mirror episode doesn't take away from the "speech" that comes before that, though:
> You pull a face, and poke it towards the stage, and we lah-di-dah, we sing and dance and tumble around. And all you see up here, it's not people, you don't see people up here, it's all fodder. And the faker the fodder, the more you love it, because fake fodder's the only thing that works any more. It's all that we can stomach. [..] Fuck you all for thinking the one thing I came close to never meant anything. For oozing around it and crushing it into a bone, into a joke. One more ugly joke in a kingdom of millions.
In my mind, the last person to blame is the one who at least made an attempt to be more, who made no "mistake" other than being one human -- facing millions who just watch -- and being oozed around and crushed eventually. Selling out will never suck as much as people, who never even had what another person sold out, being smug about someone selling out. It's like they think it vindicates them for not even having tried.
(not that I read your comment as what I'm complaining about, it's a general observation. Freebird!)
This is the black mirror episode
I'm just amazed somebody can come to this conclusion.
20 years ago you had to go to the shop, buy ONE film for $15 from a limited shelve, bring it back home, put it in a device you bought specifically for that film format and that does only that, navigate through a dubious UI, be forced to watch ads, then eventually get to the film. If you didn't like it... too bad.
Now for the same price, you have access to thousand of movies __and__ TV shows. No ads. Instant watching. Most of them were release on TV or on theater so basically same quality than other channels.
And people complain ?
I mean I do think the general level of quality of movies and TV shows is going down, but it has nothing to do with netflix. The good/sucks ratio is plummeting much the same on every medium (and I think it's because of us voting for crap with our money, like for most things in our society).
Well, I guess it's beautiful some people arrived at such a level of comfort in their life that they consider that amazing commercial offer to be not up to their standard.
> PC propaganda
While their original content do try to target specific niches including PC and SJW trends (it makes sense IMO), there are plenty of excellent content on netflix that don't follow this trend. Just opening my front page: Ajin, Rick and Morty, black mirror, battle royal, altered carbon, lastman, dirk gently, breaking bad, american beauty, pulp fiction, drive, trainspotting, house of cards, david chapelle, mad max furry road...
Yes, things like Sabrina, disenchantmenent, etc are pandering to a certain crowd. So what ? You can just click on something else. There is a lot of something else.
Yeah you really have to be tactful about it, and do parallel reconstruction wherever possible. Once they know their devices are bugged their behavior will change to evade you.
On the other hand, like sysadmins who enjoy reviewing network logs to find which married executives spend their days skulking around Grindr there are a lot of parents that abuse this to become straight-up voyeurs. There's even an episode of Black Mirror about it. Regardless of your moral/religious convictions, you really don't want to discover or become party to your kids' sexual proclivities without cause.
I don't bug my kids' devices, but I did have to resolve a sexual harassment issue with my own daughter. Her behavior was starting to become worrysome-- lengthy secretive sessions on her phone, followed by signs of distress, anxiety, not eating, etc. When she didn't have access to the phone (or the battery died) it was even worse. So I black-bagged the damn thing, found out what was going on, and confronted her only on the nature of her behavior ("you haven't been eating lately"), gently guiding the questions toward what I knew to be the truth ("is someone bothering you?") and letting her do the talking.
She's none the wiser, the problem got resolved to mutual satisfaction, and I don't have to continuously violate her trust or privacy.
There is a black mirror episode that shows you how ludicrous it is, posting pictures and hoping someone will like them, and becoming obsessed with your score.
This is a black mirror episode it has to be right?
It reminds me of Black Mirror episode where using Augmented Reality, the face of enemies is morphed into the face of monsters so the soldiers would not hesitate to kill the enemies. May we live in interesting times!
I understand the value of providing hypothetical situations, but the constant mention of Black Mirror episodes with very little other substance here is getting tiring. Without having seen Black Mirror, that synopsis doesn't add much to the conversation other than "somebody made a tvshow/movie about that". Other than the fact that a similar situation was explored, what new conclusion did the episode reach that warrants mentioning?
One of the best episodes of Black Mirror. Truly made me have deep thoughts about myself, life, and where humanity is going. Immortality seems indeed achievable, but not in a biological way our ancestors imagined.
You did see something like this on Black Mirror, specifically because Black Mirror wrote the episode based on the Chinese social credit system.
the first edit is HIV resistance, not a bad way to start the black mirror episode that is the rest of our lives from now on.
It's dystopian China. It's already basically several Black Mirror episodes put together. It doesn't generalize.
Basically the Black Mirror “Nosedive” episode.
A lot of people in here reference Black Mirror, but it also made me think of ST:VOYs Critical Care [1] (which has plot holes you can just as well drive through).
[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Critical_Care_(episode)
> People are awarded credit points for activities such as undertaking volunteer work and giving blood donations while those who violate traffic laws and charge “under-the-table” fees are punished.
> Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.
This reminds me a lot of that Black Mirror episode where everyone upvotes and downvotes each other in contribution to a social credit system that prevents a girl from traveling and being treated kindly by anyone
This would make a good basis for a Black Mirror episode. Ask the question, "How far will they go to hold you to task if you don't complete your goals, or what happens if you lie?"
Name the episode "Safeword."
Another day, another Black Mirror episode becomes eerily closer to our present reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Could be a double-edged sword. Have you seen Black Mirror -- first series, episode 3?
This was a Black Mirror episode.
"I have never felt more conflicted with empathy for and gripped by fear of an electronic conscience since."
There are several episodes of Black Mirror that explore that idea... what is ethical with respect to something ("just bits") that's also someone (a self-aware conscious being). They've done a good job filling that question with a lot of emotion; some of those episodes are really gripping.
I'm not so sure it'll be fun for everyone... that is only a couple of steps away from a Black Mirror episode (specifically S03E01, Nosedive). The risk of 'poor driver' ostracism/stigma is significant.
That sounds like something out of an black mirror episode...
Where an unprivileged worker class has to go through hours and hours of video material of the upper societal levels in order to make sure that they satisfy the grotesque utopian "always happy no conflict" image of an all seeing censor, including the denial of their own existence.
Makes me think of an episode in the TV series black mirror: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
I'm surprised this was not an episode of black mirror, sounds crazy ...but that's just me in 2018 thinking that
When it comes to the services/products, I agree with you, the general population certainly thinks they are great. However, how often have you heard of tech workers as being a positive thing for a city? How many times in TV shows / movies are tech workers seen as a boon? (e.g. Silicon Valley, Black Mirror, Searching) I'm not saying that this _necessarily_ means that literally everyone feels disdain towards the tech industry across all slices of society, I am arguing that the banner of disruption of being a good thing by definition, is misguided.
And just about a year before that on Black Mirror.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709236/
Sounds like an episode of black mirror
Yikes, really makes me wonder if they are getting ideas from dystopian science fiction films as well as black mirror.
Like the way Magic Leap picked up so many other people's literal designs and IP in their patent applications?
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmented-reality-patent-art-copied-designers
>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs
>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...
>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.
>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."
>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-concepts-1682716916
>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts
>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.
>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.
>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
>This might also look familiar: [...]
There's a black mirror episode that closely parallels that story.
('Crocodile').
> I believe when Charlie Brooker first got on board with Netflix to produce the third season of Black Mirror, he made a suggestion to introduce some kind of interactive element to the show
I really hope you’re wrong. I mean, watching Metalhead put me off watching Black Mirror for a couple of months because that episode was just so extremely fucking dark. But I really don’t want to be able to choose a different ending to that story.
In my opinion, we shouldn’t be able to water down Black Mirror with happy endings, and extend our denial about what tech can potentially do to our lives.
Indeed, I think they would be entirely appropriate for the specific case of Black Mirror -- and even more appropriate if they sort of suck, since Black Mirror is all about the unintended and depressing consequences of the abuse of technology.
For the general case of TV shows, I'm against multiple choice endings.
Netflix has created some of the best TV shows I have watched in the past few years.
Strangers things, Maniac, The End of the F*ing World, Narcos, On my block, Master of none, El Chapo, Ozark, Glow, Disenchanted, Black mirror, Dare Devil, 13 reasons why, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, A series of unfortunate events, The OA, Orange is the new black
Those are just some of the ones I can recall at the moment.
Only other shows that I use popcorn time to watch are Game of thrones and Homeland.
This argument reminds me a lot of Roger Ebert's argument that video games can never be art. https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art
He says, "My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision."
In fact, the article even notes "two of the projects are adaptations of video games!" Maybe one reason why in my view there aren't a lot of great movies based on video games is because there's something missing in the form that Netflix can improve upon. Hacker News shouldn't be a place where innovation is always so immediately viewed so skeptically. Most new ideas will fail, but shouldn't it be encouraged anyway?
Taking a step back, and more to the substance of your point, I don't think participatory art is any less one person's vision. You look at something like Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Rooms and you come away with a very clear vision from her. In the same way, what Black Mirror is trying to do with this experiment by incorporating audience participation seems to be very much a part of the story that they are trying to tell.
On the children shows, I think you are actually outside of this debate because the question is more what's better from an educational standpoint than from an artistic standpoint.
Given that it's supposed to be a Black Mirror special, I fully expect that there will not only be plenty of "crazy shit" in how they twist the user choice into something entirely unexpected (while still adhering to the precise wording of the choice option), but also that the episode topic itself will be user choice and how it can go horribly wrong.
I'd see it primarily as a hype vehicle, not as a general indication of the direction Netflix will take in the future. (If I'm mistaken I fully support your argument)
I believe when Charlie Brooker first got on board with Netflix to produce the third season of Black Mirror, he made a suggestion to introduce some kind of interactive element to the show but Netflix decided it wasn't technically possible to do what he wanted at the time. I can't remember where I read or heard this but it got me thinking about what kind of innovation you could bring to a traditional TV series when it is distributed via the internet.
For example you could show slightly different versions of the show to different viewers, of you could subtly alter the show when viewed on second or third viewing. Or the show could change depending on the time of year that you watch it. This kind of breaking of the fourth wall and breaking of fiction from reality could fit extremely well into a Black Mirror type of story. I'd love to hear what others suggest.
As far as interactivity, and 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of story telling I think that will probably get boring pretty quick. We already have this kind of story telling with games such as Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls and while many people view those games as innovative forms of cinematic games, I would say they are pretty tedious and non-immersive forms of cinema.
This reads like the summary of an episode of Black Mirror.
True, distracting the public, kind of like the first episode of Black Mirror.
Together with the related Black Mirror episode, which I wasn't able to finish because it made me too sick to my stomach - too realistic, too close, too terrifying :S
(Season 3, Episode 1, for example: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-mirror-season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap)
I'm pretty sure a traumatized content moderator was extracting revenge on the people misbehaving on social media on a CSI Cyber episode, was it on Black Mirror too?
Sorry, you can not purchase this iTunes Song, please make some real life friends and call them first.
I'm guessing this is basically a "bot score" and if it is too high/low they'll start hitting you with a CAPCHA when you try to buy something through your phone. I seriously doubt it will involve other people rating their interactions with you, making it rather unlike the Black Mirror episode they mentioned.
You can just watch that Black Mirror episode. Well, all of them, I guess. Things don't go well.
So which is worse, the Black Mirror scenario (everyone rates each other), or the Chinese real-life version (the Communist Party rates you)?
Is it better to fear the State or your fellow citizens?
The Black Mirror episode, btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
This is not like the Black Mirror episode, Nosedive (or a similar episode of the Orville), because people aren’t rating others and scores aren’t known at all. The behavior changes from constantly rating and being rated by lots of subjective raters is what scared me in the episode.
This is similar to other risk or trust algorithm used by banks, healthcare, ctrfit agencies, email services, etc.
It could be bad depending on what Apple does with it, obviously, but this seems like a way integrate more device data into their fraud detection methods.
The video's not actually from Black Mirror, it was an independent short film.
Black Mirror does have a very similar episode though: Hated in the Nation (S03E06).
There was a Black Mirror episode that is tangentially related, called Arkangel iirc, which censored any scary and not safe for kids content in their vision, installed at an age where the child was probably too young to remember the procedure or a life before having that system installed.
It just feels too much like that first episode of season 3 of Black Mirror. Where your status in society is determined by other people's perception of your happiness.
I guess I would be like the truck driver that's lives completely out of mainstream. "Even your credit score will someday be controlled by how much people like you." Sounds horrible. That is the opposite of the future that I want.
Maybe some people don't work well with others. Has society already deemed these people unproductive/unnecessary? Social influence is just like any other magnanimous recognition; few and far between.
It seems like there is this trend where LinkedIn bloggers pick out the 7 best attributes from their role models and suddenly everyone has to adopt that mindset or you are shamed out of your "influential" position. Just because Arianna Huffington did it, doesn't mean we all have to.
What is "cross-cultural competency"? Does that mean I have to give up my office with a window so my Muslim co-worker can pray before he eats his lunch alone every day? Or does that mean it is OK to be late for meetings like in many Asian cultures? Buzzword bingo.
Feyerabend explores the difficult process of scientific progress in the classic Against Method. He describes how society finds it difficult to develop new scientific theories to better explain new evidence because of our confirmation bias to conventional theory.
For example the earth was once understood to be at the center of the solar system, when telescopes could better observe planetary behavior it first lead simply to more precise epicycles.
In the book he points out that one way we tend to break through this hold on how we frame evidence, is by considering metaphors from the Arts. For example, religious writings helped inform the works of Copernicus and Newton.
So to generally answer your question, I think some insights will come to us from the Arts, like science fiction books/movies/games. For example, the show Black Mirror provides some ideas that we may at some point take for granted.
Using your basic health data like HR and weight against you would make a great episode of Black Mirror actually.
Black Mirror tends to reuse a lot of tech themes across many episodes. The same theme is in the White Christmas[0] episode.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
I preferred the world when more things were like an xkcd comic, rather than like a Black Mirror episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
Hopefully it would be better than the related Black Mirror episode (Nosedive), which started with an interesting premise, but handled it in a very crass and immature way, more reminiscent of stupid Hollywood teen comedies (e.g. American Pie).
No, that episode was broadcast in December 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_(Black_Mirror)
The pig thing wasn't until 2015. Well, the allegations weren't made until 2015 - I guess technically the event, if it occurred, took place earlier.
Black Mirror got it right about Prime Minster David Cameron having sex with a pig, so it's not a big surprise some of the other episodes are coming true, too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/downing-street-stays-silent-over-claims-david-cameron-put-genitals-in-a-dead-pigs-mouth-while-at-10510500.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggate
"The race is on to create pollinators as small and smart as honeybees."
That self replicates, heals itself, programs itself, costs nothing to operate or design, and most importantly doesn't behave like drones in the tv series black mirror. I think it would be better to find out why they are going extinct and more importantly the political will to fight it.
Didn't I see this Black Mirror episode?
I came here to point out nosedive. I searched just in case and voila!
Black Mirror is amazing ofc. But specifically this episode, Nosedive, should be studied and analysed in public schools.
Kanopy is incredible if you want quality curated worldwide content. Free with your library card, at least in LA.
Filmstruck for criterion collection and worldwide classical cinema. $80/y.
If you have amazon prime you get some blockbusters for free.
Some att plans include hbo go.
Netflix still has some good documentaries but their new releases have been low quality, except possibly for black mirror.
There's at least one Black Mirror episode about this premise. If I remember correctly, some others also touch this. It's worth while to watch a couple episodes. They're not all great, but many are good food for thought if you like to philosophize about the impact of technology on our future.
Those examples should credit Ford and Subway as director. :)
I'm the same. The Netflix version of Black Mirror loses so much impact from the addition of 20 mins of dead filler.
Don't forget overly long and overblown fight and chase scenes that all movies must now have. They just bore me senseless. The first one I saw was fun, probably Blues Brothers, but even back then they were taking the mickey. Never the choreography and humour of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Nowadays at home when a movie starts a fight against the hero, or the car (spaceship) chase I tend to do something else for 5.
Breaking Bad was the best series to come out the US in ages. Even they lost the plot with the insanely long shootout with infinite ammo and insanely bad marksmanship. Thankfully that was a one off so very easy to forgive. :)
Brit series go too far the other way and cram far too much into too few episodes. I've been enjoying Last Kingdom but boy are they spoiling it by cramming two books into every season, with fewer episodes per series compared to the US average.
I really wish social media would "peak" to towards meeting people in real life semi-spontaneously.
No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads.
Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attributes identity. The system will group people with similar personalities/attributes. Every once in a while, "the system" it sends you a text "Free at 9am? Mountain biking at X park for an hour with beer after with 3 new people? Text yes to opt-in"
Get revenue by having businesses bid on being the beer spot. Refine the algorithm by having an anonymous rating system after the fact.
I like Meetup but it must be taxing to always manage the organization/logistics of a meeting.
Yes. I just realized I blended the show Betas,an episode of Black Mirror, and the 2016 movie Nerve together.
Edit: Grammar
> I kind of want to write a dystopian story about babies being bartered based on their social network rating
Would be an interesting "prequel" to the troubling but good "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
So are you saying that idiots will knowingly link their bank accounts to Facebook and star in their own Black Mirror episode? Sounds amazing.
If it wants to. But I presume it already has done all that and there's no real reason for it to anymore.
Have you ever watched the show "The Black Mirror?" There's a famous episode in which one person's consciousness gets planted into another person's mind. The plot focused on the fact that one person had all the agency and control, and the other person didn't, and at first you think that it's hell, no way could that ever work.
But at the end of the show, it gives you an example of where it would work really really well, a parent living on in the mind of their child. Parents already give up a ton of agency to their kids, so this was a really beautiful resolution. Where it gets ugly is where one person starts to want control rather than to just enjoy the ride.
The other personality in my brain is a little like that. Something that doesn't mind having no agency and just watching what I do and interacting with me when I want it to.
And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate.
You know this episode of Black Mirror with Hamm...? Nevermind
I immediately thought of the "Hated in the Nation" episode of Black Mirror.
"Orville", a semi-serious version of Star Trek by Seth MacFarlane has one amusing "Black Mirror"-ultra-lite episode about this: "Majority Rule". In this world, law has been replaced by a simple upvote/downvote system and pictures of people doing stupid things can go viral on a "global feed".
Let's wait for the Black Mirror episode where your internet points will make your Avatar's afterlife more enjoyable.
> anything less than 5 stars is going to kill their work
Reminded me of the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. May be we are already there. On watching the episode I thought that would never happen. But things change so slowly that it feels completely normal later.
There is a Black Mirror episode of this. People run around "rating" each other positively in fear that they might get a bad rating.
Only when someone shows weakness does the hive mind pounce and pile on the negative reviews.
> I assume anything less than 5 stars is going to kill their work so I just give 5 stars
I do the same. I feel like Uber drivers are already living in a world that's way too close to that Black Mirror episode, and as someone who probably makes a lot more money than they do, I'm not really comfortable having that kind of power over them. I feel like rating them 5 stars is the least I can do for someone who's doing a difficult and low-paid job and doesn't really deserve to be under constant scrutiny.
The Black Mirror third* season social media hellscape episode starring Bryce Howard Dallas seems a more apt reference than the Jon Hamm as sexual deviant episode.
The smallest breaches of protocol snowballed into her becoming a persona non grata all while trying to please a system that doesn't actually care.
Same goes for binge-watching a series.
Imagine watching all seasons of black mirror in one day...
Newspaper headlines sound like taken from a Black Mirror episode by the day.
Glee and Grey's Anatomy are from the OP, not my examples. Netflix is hiring the creators of these shows to make more shows, presumably somewhat similar. Breaking Bad is not from Netflix, neither is GoT which was interesting for about 1½ seasons. Even worse, Black Mirror was IMHO better before it moved to Netflix (but to some extent this is true of every show, creators have more pent-up, fresh ideas in the beginning).
While the tidal wave of capeshit is unwatchable and depressing, this is not all the competition Netflix has to contend with. First, you have every movie and tv show ever made. Then you can watch them again. Most shows can't even beat a 7th rewatch of Seinfeld.
Second, you can do something else than watching TV, like hitting the gym, writing a blog, taking your dog for a surprise extra walk, playing with your kids, making a steak instead of having takeout, cleaning your room while listening to Jordan Peterson telling you to clean your room... anything really.
And, I would argue, all of these are a better use of time than anything on Netflix right now.
There's tons of great TV shows nowadays. Mentioning Grey's anatomy and Glee does a disservice to TV.
Besides the obvious Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad there's Stranger things, Black Mirror, Westworld, just to name a few. Hell, all of the above are much much better than 90% of the crappy Marvel/superhero/blockbuster movie Hollywood keeps spewing nowadays.
That show was incredibly on the mark, if Black Mirror was a comedy it would have been that show.
The episode about the black engineer who isn't detected by the motion sensors is basically straight out of HP's webcam fiasco[1](although the show takes it to the logical and hilarious extreme).
[1] http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/12/hp-webcam-colorblindbut-not-in-a-good-way.html
Exactly. Thinking that the UK without the EU is going to do any better is either naive or willingly ignorant.
With people like May at the helm the UK is already well on its way to a special episode of Black Mirror.
This is straight up Black Mirror (season 3, episode 1: Nosedive) Obviously the whole point of that episode was to imagine Instagram in its darkest future, but it's scary how much of it is becoming real, and separately with the roll-out of social credit scores in China. Scary stuff.
---
Hansen: So in terms of quality, you could use a punch up right there. Ideally, that's up votes from quality people.
Lacie: Quality people?
Hansen: High fours. Impress those up-scale folks, you'll gain velocity on your arc and there's your boost.
This article is fantastic.
As an American who likes the occasional UK show, I have the possibly mistaken impression that BBC shows run on a more similar model to Netflix. It seems like they will tell a story for about as long as the original idea is interesting and then the show ends.
In the U.S. it seems like anything popular will get milked as long as possible.
Oddly, it seems like even in the Netflix model there are "series" and "movie" categories that mirror film and TV running lengths and seasons.
It would be interesting to see more deviations from that pattern. Shorter serials with longer episodes. Marathon length features.
Black Mirror is the best example of a non-traditional show as far as episode length and quantity and I think it works quite well.
> I hope that signs and signals can most fade away. Imagine walking through a city without street signs or advertisements or stoplights
Will that get us a Black Mirror episode where no door or amenity will function until you put the lenses in? LargeCorp was concerned at the potential loss of trade so lobbied for a city bylaw requiring them. Or perhaps the Netflix Anon movie where all buildings are covered with 100' high virtual ads?
Don't get me wrong I'd love to get back to a built environment usually only seen in older photos where every surface isn't required to be a marketing opportunity. I just suspect somewhere along the way to this beautiful future there'll be a bait and switch. Cue uBlock for Lens(tm).
Truly the stuff of nightmares. Makes me think about that episode of Black Mirror with the Big Dog (DARPA) inspired surveillance robot...
Reminds me of this Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Insert that one black mirror episode.
> The rush to rate every experience and interaction has much the same effect. The ever present manager monitoring your output is a reality and we’re all involved.
This exact problem was explored in a Black Mirror episode, where every interaction was rated with a star system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
I want to say "that episode really freaked me out" but... That's true for almost every episode of Black Mirror.
This is eerily similar to the concept of a 'cookie' seen in the Black Mirror episode, White Christmas. (Spoiler Alert)
A cookie is a device "that is inserted under the clients head by the brain and kept there for a week, giving it time to accurately replicate the individuals consciousness. It is then removed and installed in a larger, egg shaped device which can be connected to a computer or tablet (to automate their smart house controls as if the house was knew their personal preferences moving from room to room.)"
What is the closest "Black Mirror" episode to Google Home?
White Christmas with Cookie?
Much like there is a XKCD for everything, there'll be a Black Mirror episode, too :)
> Black Mirror has gone downhill in an effort to create a mass audience. (Mostly the fourth season)
I just wanted to say that I strongly disagree. "USS Callister" and "Hang the DJ" in particular were great episodes in my opinion and very well received overall. "Black Museum" was also quite good. And "Metalhead", together with the black and white versions of Fury Road and Logan, presented a very interesting view of a mostly hopeless future.
Black Mirror has gone downhill in an effort to create a mass audience. (Mostly the fourth season) What they do is create "hit" content that is very consumable not necessarily great or timeless.
"We need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art" ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
That said, their documentary productions are way better than the crap Discovery, History Chanel, et al. have been producing this past decades or so.
Overall, I think it's a positive change. But I think there are other effects too.
One is the trend toward longer, multi-season story arcs. This is also a trend in traditional television, but seems that the single episode story is dead on Netflix.
That's a shame, because it often is possible to succinctly express an idea in 30mins or 1hour. But it's in Netflix's best interests to keep you hooked on a show and "watching one more episode". That's particularly valuable for content that is released week-by-week. It also has other benefits, the more you watch, the more you're dependent on their service.
The one exception to this I've seen on Netflix is Black Mirror. But that was a show developed outside of the platform initially. I can't see something like Star trek the next generation, or another idea driven show which explores a single idea in a single episode being green lit on Netflix, and that's a shame.
I kinda want to see a black mirror episode of AI overlords shepherding humans for their own good :)
I enjoyed its Black Mirror episode
Sounds a the Black Mirror episode. Actually the one about the social ranking system
I would not say great. I would say it’s useful and efficient in some circumstances, and unhelpful in others. There are some things that don’t scale, and social moores might act as a safety valve in those cases versus an economic transaction.
Some human interactions are only a few A/B tests away from turning into a Black Mirror episode.
You should watch the episode of Black Mirror where a game developer creates a horror game with a neural link causing the gamer to "see" and "feel" things that aren't there. It goes horribly wrong. Let's hope this future you imagine never arrives.
The next season of Black Mirror may just be a documentary on China
I’m apparently #blessed to have grown up in that middle era remembering before and after the internet where I think it’s less likely to have this type of insecurity.
I wish i had a crystal ball to see if were social media is going, for me, away is the only answer. For everyone else... I really can’t tell when it will peak.
That black mirror on the topic episode was so good!
You might like the TV series Black Mirror. Especially Season 4 Episode 4.
If you haven't seen this episode of Black Mirror yet, highly encourage you do: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/.
> Think about the films people will remember from the last decade: you won't find any Netflix films among them.
Films, maybe not. But House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things, Black Mirror and The Crown have just as much cultural significance as Hollywood movies. And if we expand to HBO, then we can call in Game of Thrones, which has had far more cultural impact than La La Land. This is related to a cousin comment of mine: films are no longer the most important cultural medium. Long-form shows with high production values are.
It's also worth noting that Icarus, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, is from Netflix.
This has to be a Black Mirror episode
> Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy.
This is disingenuous at best this is a tool for surveillance and its misuse in public life is more obvious than the advantages it might bring. People will naturally distrust a government that spies on them constantly and that has nothing to do with good or bad government.
There is an episode of black mirror on the mother who surveils her daughter constantly if the mother is good why do we feel disgusted by her attitude?
I applauded apple for publicly denying the government a backdoor in their phones.
Yes, this can be a very good topic for an episode on Black Mirror TV series [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror
This is just marketing for black mirror season 5, right?
Does anybody have a guess as to how many people died as a result of this scam?
(And is it an episode of black mirror that I'm even on this train of thought?)
And much of it predates people even thinking about this stuff. Thus, you have a TV series like Northern Exposure for which the music was a fairly integral part and you can't even buy DVDs with all the original music included.
Even today, I was reading that one Black Mirror episode for which the closing song was just so on had licensed it for 15 years. Which is a long time but hardly forever.
>Citizens with low social credit would also be prohibited from enrolling their children at high-paying private schools
This is what leads to a sort of caste system, Because the children of people with bad social credit cannot go to good schools, they are stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad social circles which leads to bad social credit and poverty.
This just leads to a cycle of poverty and discrimination without any opportunity for people to redeem themselves.
Also reminds me of a Black mirror episode on social credit.
Wasn't there a Black Mirror episode about this? Seems like a terrible idea, but will inevitably end up being required by many companies, just like credit scores.
I think I saw this Black Mirror episode.
Honestly turning it into an auction sounds so close to a Black Mirror episode I can almost already picture the cast
I'd be alright with a few quid here and there to remove all ads from the site and remove my data from the advertisers' hands (Max limit: ${netflix_price}/mo) but an auction would definitely have me glancing elsewhere
There was a black mirror episode about something very similar. "The Waldo Moment"
The video also pairs well with the penultimate Black Mirror episode in the latest season (S4E5, "Metalhead").
Black Mirror isn't even prophetic at this point. It just feels like a documentary on real life.
"How awesome would it be if that guy who drives like an asshole all the time would actually have that affect his life?"
You clearly haven't seen the first post-Netflix Black Mirror episode.
It's a big mistake to expect people (ANY people, government or randoms, does not matter) to use this type of ranking system in a logical, rational way. Most people are unable to make logical and rational decisions. Just look at what people are eating for lunch, let alone who they are voting and WHY.
Basically any ranking system of this type has two fates, depending on who does the ranking (the people or the government):
In case of people doing the ranking, it becomes a popularity contest that rewards what you project of yourself to the external world. Remember, your external projection != you. This is already going on in the context of social media, and has started a de-evolution and demise of our civilization. Nobody cares about their inner selves anymore, and why care if what you project brings you greater rewards from the external world.
In case of government, well, just no. Stalin-type power gripping has never been easier. Someone criticising? Just change a single float variable (the person's score) from say 9.7 to 0.2 and the problem solves itself.
PS. We don't need a ranking system to end someone's asshole-esque driving. Find them, break enough facial bones and make sure they understand it was because of their driving. I promise you that will be the end of it. If not, there are about 44 or 358 solutions that fix the problem for good.
I disagree with your use of guilt by association with Black Mirror.
There are both horrifying and also amazing technologies shown in that show. In terms of masking people in images, that would be the White Christmas episode.
The ability for excellent image segmentation was not the scary technology there, it was the ability for a government to control your vision and hearing at the neural level.
Also, that Black Mirror episode.
Edit: Turns out it's exactly what the author intended. Damn.
I just saw one which said "a show that's all about you", This sounds like a very creepy idea which should be turned into a black mirror episode.
Is there a blackmirror episode where the existence of a program similar to black mirror ingrains paranoia in all the citizens and the country goes back to 80s tech? (e.g. become luddites)
Black mirror season 4 episode ...
Fun trivia:
Charlie Brooker talks himself of predicting a Trump-like person becoming president and that Black Mirror "Waldo" episode.
Don't recall the source.
Someone with a twitter account should tweet this at Donald Trump.
That will be a real black mirror episode.
Sounds like the script of a Black Mirror episode to me.
Meets a Black Mirror episode.
When real life sounds like a Black Mirror episode
This has me picturing a community of people wearing identical "male"/"female" plastic hairpieces and massive fake smiles, under constant surveillance. Communicating is done solely via Facebook, so the fake smiles become permanently burned into the residents' faces.
Facebook as a physical community is a truly terrifying place to imagine. I'm not sure a Black Mirror episode could even properly capture it.
Zuckerberg: "If I can't be president of the US, I can at least be president of the HOA"
A teacher I had in High School explained a particular portion of history to us about like this: "I can rule via Love or via Fear. People can fall out of Love; People don't fall out of Fear." So this monarch dictated government via Fear, and it worked until he died [which is the point much of the time].
Now, the monarchs may not die. "Facebook Forever" as reality? A 'Black Mirror' episode isn't a far stretch, and to be fair so is the opposite -- both of which we can see in reality today.
Being skeptical of tech companies is great. Behaving appropriately is also great. Going "all or nothing" can be debated. I'm interested in hearing about something in the middle, should such exist.
And then the most common minimum-wage job would be spinning the wheels on a bitcoin-mining bicycle, kind of like in one of those Black Mirror episodes.
Planning of the system in its current form started in 2014: https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020/
The Black Mirror episode about a system like this came out in 2016.
I already saw this episode on Black Mirror [0]. Is this a rerun?
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
Yes, the episode is called "Nosedive."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/2017/12/15/black-mirror-coming-true-china-rating-affects-home-transport/
Yeah, season 3 episode 1 "nosedive"—worth the watch (on Netflix). You don't need to see any other black mirror episodes to get it. (Don't watch S1E1 1!)
So if we assume they're getting their ideas from Black Mirror, how much longer until they start using humans for energy? [1]
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/
Any sufficiently advanced technology that is capable of resurrecting your brain/consciousness, is also capable of subjecting your digital consciousness to eternal torture worse than anything experienced by Man thus far. If you haven't already, check out Black Mirror's last episode: Black Museum. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, even if there's only an infinitesimal chance of it happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
A heads up for anyone interested in such matters, but an episode in the latest season of Black Mirror is specifically about this :-) (Indeed, most of the season is about the ethics of simulated consciousness in various ways.)
The issues I have with Hulu aren't all that different from the issues I have with Netflix. Yes, content is removed without warning, but it is on Netflix too. Yes, there's a delay between a show being broadcast and it showing up on Hulu, but there's a considerably larger gap with Netflix. Neither of these applies to Hulu's own original content, same as it doesn't with Netflix.
All the streaming services, IMO, share the same flaw - they can't provide all the content I want to watch. I really wish we'd ended up in a world where I can just buy the latest episodes of Black Mirror, Handmaid's Tale and Star Trek: Discovery when they come out, rather than have to maintain separate monthly subscriptions for each, but alas. Ironically, I can buy a lot of network show content by the episode on iTunes/Google Play/whatever.
Perhaps you meant S02E01 of Black Mirror? Episode 2 of that season is "White Bear" which has nothing to do with cloning.
I'm probably just out of touch, but what's with the obsession with dogs, anyhow?
> I was so devastated by the loss of my dear Samantha, after 14 years together, that I just wanted to keep her with me in some way. It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew I could keep some part of her alive, something that came from her DNA. A friend had cloned his beloved dog, and I was very impressed with that dog. So Sammie’s doctor took some cells from inside her cheek and the skin on her tummy just before she died. And we sent those cells to ViaGen Pets in Texas. We weren’t even sure if the cells would take.
I mean, imagine if someone said this and it was a human. You'd look at 'em like they're insane [1].
[1] By the way, this is literally a Black Mirror episode, S02 E01 (edit: Thanks for the correction!)
This is exciting and worrying in equal parts - can’t wait for the Black Mirror episode.
I was relieved to find that this was not a particularly disturbing Black Mirror episode coming to life.
I agree, and they explicitly state this as one of their three goals (" is an important step forward for developing multi-agent AI systems, for building intermediating technology for machine-human interaction, and for advancing the progress on interpretable AI.")
However, I think this will be even more valuable in human-computer interactions (their second goal).
Consider: if you just had a fight with a lover, and then had a bad day at work, and Alexa recommends that you watch a Black Mirror, it might be awful timing. In fact, as humans, we know if someone walks in panting, and frowning, and slams their hands on the desk, we shouldn't crack a joke. I think there was some research out of Google X about how much more useful robots seemed if they gave out signs of what they were doing (appeared frustrated if they couldn't complete a task etc).
Some episodes are much stronger than others. I think the eye camera episode was good, because it humanizes the dystopia: it moves past abstract moralizing and unrealistic "how things could be" like in e.g. Brave New World and gives you a real human story. It feels more real than reading stories about orgy-porgies, etc. And the technology for it is basically already here.
I think Altered Carbon is a better dystopian tech story though. The actual plot is not even really the point. The setting, backdrop and society that it envisions feels more plausible than any episode of Black Mirror.
The best sci fi dystopian stories imprint our current economic and social structures onto a new future with technology: the world of Altered Carbon asks what if we had our current economic system, which creates a class of impossibly powerful oligarchs who hoard all of the world's wealth and act with impunity while the poor suffer and die, but now these technologies allow their power to extend and expand indefinitely, past death?
The crux of every tech sci fi dystopian story is the question: What if we progress technologically but refuse to progress economically or socially? What if we encourage people to study STEM and sneer at the humanities forever? What if economics is always taught as an exercise in cheerleading for our current system?
Media like this makes us think about the changes that need to be made as technology more and more amplifies the (potentially bad) choices we make about the world we want to live in.
It's easy to get caught in the echo chamber of "technology good, disruption good, gadgets fun" especially living in the tech world so I think it's great stories like these make us take a step back.
Most people find that they like some Black Mirror episodes a lot more than others, it's inherent in the nature of this type of anthology SF format.
The people being people thing is _right_. A good antidote to the sort of beliefs we easily trick ourselves into here is to go read Samuel Pepys personal diary. Read about a year's worth, doesn't matter which bits, start in 1666 if you want to actually connect events to history (that's the year of the Great Fire of London). Pepys is over 350 years different in time from us. Yet he's not really different at all. He worries about money, he suffers illness, he moans about incompetent people, he lusts after pretty people who won't sleep with him (and to be fair, some who do). I say Pepys partly because he wrote this stuff down for his own records, whereas most earlier writers have an audience in mind and so we must assume they self-censor, and partly because he wrote just after English had settled down, his meaning is easy to follow without a modern translator between you adding their own interpretation.
My biggest overall knock is that I often found that there really wasn't a payoff for unrelenting grimness. Which I guess gets to your point #2. Although I'd say 1.) The series is called Black Mirror after all and 2.) There are exceptions like "San Junipero," which was probably my favorite episode. (think, in part, the unrelenting grimness may actually help set the stage for episodes that were a bit more hopeful.)
Overall, like a lot of anthology series, you could probably pick the best N (where, for me in this case, N is probably somewhere between 5 and 10) and easily skip the rest.
> Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good?
I see it as a collection of short movies and not like a series. With that mindset, I only watch a few of "episodes" each season.
Since I only watch the movies that interest me, I really like Black Mirror.
Seen that way, it makes sense. I wouldn't watch a lot of those episodes if they were feature lentgh movies, so I don't watch them as short movies.
Every episode that interested me at first glance did not disappoint.
[OFF TOPIC]
Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good?
I've seen around five episodes and the only one I genuinely thought to be good was the very first one.
1 - The technology is extremely vague. There is no way to really gauge it's impact besides what the writer explicitly shows.
2 - The episodes are extremely moralist. They usually take a stance of "Look How Bad This Is", usually using appeals to emotion. They don't show the other side, the good side of that concept.
3 - In my opinion, the story of most of them is uninteresting. The most egregious is the "eye camera" one. The whole episode drops you hints of how that technology affects society, but we are focused on a lovers quarrel.
4 - None of those show anything really new. If you removed the new concept, it would be _really_ easy to replace it with known stuff. In a world with a new disruptive technology they write people acting like they always did!
5 - This is mostly my elitism, but I hate most people's reaction to it. They see the episode, adore it, and just take it at face value. I watch it, think it's crap, and spend the next hour discussing it and thinking about it. Most people don't think beyond what is shown on the episode. I fear that that, coupled with (1) and (2), is making people fear technology [1].
(I have to add that the last minute of the "robot boyfriend" episode are so nuanced, subtle and insidious that I'm amazed the writers managed to slip that through. Especially how dumbed down the whole episode was)
/rant
[1] I think people should be careful with technology. I have a bit of "privacy paranoia". But that should come from reason.
The Black Mirror episode they are talking about certainly exists in various forms. I recently deleted my Reddit account out of similar aggravation.
Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Stupid popular things aren't necessarily less stupid out of popularity by a similarly uninformed collective.
Reminds me of that black mirror episode
Technologically speaking: Yeah, that's a nice feature. Real world: This will be awful, I really don't want any DB to have a photo of me associated with transaction or authentification. Yes, I do have profile pictures, but allowing a service to get a "stream" of your face will be way worse, and I cannot imagine what would happen if this DB get compromised...anyway...still a nice Black Mirror episode though..
For some reason this reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror where you had to pedal a bike or watch ads to get tokens.
I feel like we've crossed from "Simpsons did it" to "Black Mirror did it", as Black Mirror has an episode (Season 3 Episode 1) which is a similar world that everyone now inhabits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive (warning, contains spoilers)
Thanks. I keep meaning to get around to Black Mirror where there's an Expect script. And I spent forever getting accepted into the WordPerfect Macro community to look at an old episode of The Outer Limits.
One day I'll have time...
Some recent TechnoScifi has done a really interesting job getting this sort of stuff into the general public. Black Mirror, Altered Carbon are both terrific and dive into tech ethics to different extents, and the outreach there is many millions of viewers.
That's sort of an interesting potential take on this - how do you take ethical questions and get drastically wider outreach for them (vs a static class). Revisionist history has a recent podcast along how satire sort of lives in an interesting realm here (and how modern, western satire seems to miss the mark).
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox
Everyone settles, realistically speaking, as you’re optimizing for a local maximum when dating, not a global maximum.
You’re equating more choices with better outcomes. I argue that isn’t the case. Unless we’re going to feed every data point we can into a ML black box, and out will come your arranged ideal partnership (there’s even a black mirror episode about this).
Getting to know people sounds more fun, but I’m old shrug
Keanu Reeves in the former, Willem Dafoe in the latter. I'll give both a whirl, thank you.
From what I can tell nobody brought up David Cronenberg either. I liked his works [1] when I was younger (not sure if I still would now). I especially liked eXistenZ, but also Videodrome, The Fly, and Scanners.
I just started binge watching The Man In The High Castle and it exactly underlines my statement in my previous post: great storyline (IMO), but not depending much on CGI. I think if the story lacks, all you got going for it is CGI (or not if there is none). CGI may impress you when you're still young, but as you grow older you see through the façade. Especially when its overdone. Because older movies lack it, and therefore are rather limited (take for example old Star Wars which heavily used costumes, models, and camera tricks). It might feel a bit dated, if not just from the hair models. Yet sometimes the nostalgia hits the nail (such as in Black Mirror's San Junipero episode). Not exactly sure why. While I'm thoroughly enjoying The Man In The High Castle series my partner hates anything related to WWII so thats yet another series we cannot watch together.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cronenberg#As_director
I've only seen about 20 minutes of the first episode and couldn't enjoy it. I'd like to at least finish the first episode before I make judge for myself whether this one's worth my time (though I'm gonna first watch The Man in the High Castle). Generally though as a rule of thumb: Nice CGI doesn't make up for a terrible story, but a good story can make up for the lack of good CGI. E.g. I did not find the story good in the follow-ups of The Matrix.
I fully underline your statement regarding PKD's Electric Dreams as well as all the Black Mirror seasons. Furthermore, let us not forget that several other of PKD's works have seen a movie adaptations. I can recommend Total Recall (both; watch older first), Blade Runner (both; watch older first), A Scanner Darkly (if you can stand the art style; personally, I loved it), Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau (Screamers was OKish). There are series adaptations as well. Check Wikipedia for all the adaptations [1]
I'm not aware of any motion picture adaptations of Stephenson's or Gibson's works. Although I just found out via Wikipedia that the game Netrunner [2] is a derivative work of the Sprawl trilogy, and also The Matrix heavily "drawn" from the Sprawl trilogy as well [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android:_Netrunner
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Literary_and_cultural_significance
Lost interest in the first 30 mins. What I saw was a contrived story timeline inconsistencies (people protesting 1960s style outside the building - really?), flying cars with drivers (who can drive and land badly - really?), stacks stored on spines (and only the richest can afford the cloud - really?), squaller living on the planet with rich living on the towers (not original by any stretch), one special living person better than everyone in the universe (again, original?, really?), a police department functioning like the 1990s, a woman detective have inexplicably drives Neo (sic) to the super villain and will inevitably be romantically involved with Neo? Please people - watch some Black Mirror and plethora of short Sci-fi films on Youtube for intellectual entertainment.
Eerily similar to Black Mirror season 3 episode 6 "Hated in the Nation"
Since this thread is about an article mentioning Black Mirror, I am reminded of the episode "crocodile". It depicts a tech that allows insurance companies and law enforcement to tap into people's memory and extract images of what has been seen.
Reading visual information from the mind is still far off, but if someday smart glasses become widespread, and assuming that they backlog their video input to the cloud or something, then for all intents and purposes, it'd be basically the same.
A very significant fraction of the population already wear glasses, so it's not too far fetched to imagine that soon, everything we see will be logged somewhere.
Idea for a Black Mirror episode (from the past):
In the future, people of the internet are unable to write about new technology without resorting to increasingly tiresome, lazy and spurious references to a popular British Twilight Zone remake.
I think 'Deepfake' is a great name for an episode of Black Mirror.
The system was announced in China in 2015, and the Black Mirror episode was released in 2016.
The Black Mirror was likely inspired by the Chinese system.
Reminds me of Black Mirror episode where everyone is rated by the number of stars they receive and are obsessed with the likes or dislikes. 0 stars end up in a dungeon even if they've broken no laws. Very cypberpunk/dystopian.
Definitely not. I saw the Black Mirror episode.
There's a Black Mirror episode for this isn't there?
this reads like a black mirror episode
Especially since this topic covers about half of the episodes in the most recent season of Black Mirror.
The Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits" has something like this as its premise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Some thoughts after going through the whitepaper,
> The BAT will, in early stages, be specifically tied to Brave browsers and Brave servers, along with verified publishers
Before this, they mention that other browsers are free to adopt BAT. However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data reported is legitimate. Presumably then only the Brave browser will be able to use this token. A novel, trustless/decentralised way to verify user attention would be of a paper on its own.
> Ad fraud will be prevented or reduced by publication of source code and cryptographically secure transactions. Ads served to individual browser/users will also be rate-limited and tied to active windows and tabs.
How will this be ensured without some kind of centralised whitelist of signatures/keys?
If the system is going to be centralised anyway, why use a blockchain? Blockchains are terribly inefficient append only DBs, and are only useful when there is not even a single server on the internet that you can trust. There is no point to using a blockchain if everything that can go on the blockchain is going to be mediated by a company/government/organisation.
> A 300 million endowment is for early adopters of Brave and the BAT at up to 5 BAT/user
followed by
> BATs are meant only for experts in cryptographic tokens and blockchain-based software systems
So they expect to get up to 60 million "experts in cryptographic tokens" to switch to their browser?
It will be more like an episode of black mirror.
Fidelity to the plot isn't paramount, but I'd want fidelity to the essence of the story. Both were violated in the aforementioned episodes.
It's worth pointing out that Dick's stories are dark. Autofac has one of the most apocalyptically pessimistic endings ever written (though his seminal "Second Variety" manages to be even darker). I can't think of many that are in some way uplifting. Most of his best stories — "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", "Impostor", "The Electric Ant", "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts", "Second Variety", "Explorers We" and "Colony", to name a few — are end on a dark, often depressing note. Of the few classics that aren't, such as "Paycheck" and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", would probably not lend themselves to Black Mirror-style stories, although I'd love to see faithful adaptations of these. (By the way, if you don't find these stories great or original, I don't know what to tell you. They are masterpieces!)
If the producers didn't want dark stories, it's strange that they would choose Philip K. Dick.
That sounds like a premise for the next black mirror episode.. though they will make it a lot more scarier!
There’s a “Black Mirror” episode in there somewhere...
Black Mirror episode idea: Luxury computer company starts including thermal front-facing cameras, as well as heartbeat monitors in laptop palm rest areas, in their hardware. Releases StressKit, an API which is promptly used by companies to optimize their experiences. At first, it's great: Slack silences notifications when someone's "in the zone," and Netflix has its greatest ever season of hyper-optimized horror movies.
But then our protagonist, a programmer at a large software company, is told to code a feature that subtly influences the behavior of users to drive them towards microtransactions in their moments of greatest stress. Protagonist finds this horrific and threatens to go public, at which point her colleagues, fearful for their own careers, start using the prototype system to manipulate her towards paranoia and madness. In true Black Mirror form, this escalates to neverending existential horror by the end.
*mic drop
There was a black mirror episode about exactly this.
One step closer to Black Mirror Season 4: Crocodile, among other things.
I really like Black Mirror.
Not to distract from your point, but I feel like the writers need to broaden their dystopian topics to other forms of tech. They also miss the "punch line" on many of their episodes, they line things up so perfectly and then don't commit.
It's almost a let down not to see things crumble completely.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror)
The ending should have been streamed lived to the masses, like a virtual "dog fight". That would pull the entire world into the story and force the intelligent viewer to think about how even as a bystander we are all part of the problem.
Black Mirror, season 5. Make it happen Mr. Brooker.
Wasn't this basically episode 2 of season 3 of "Black Mirror"?
"The show itself, Altered Carbon, is set three hundred years into the future, at a time where human bodies are now interchangeable: Death just isn't a thing."
EDIT: Spoilers, indeed. Sorry!
Just finished the last episode of Season 4 Black Mirror called Black Museum [1] and it covers this subject as well. You can say the same about the infamous San Junipero [2].
You could even argue the manga/anime Ghost In The Shell is also about that [3].
Can recommend all of the above. Thought provoking, suspenseful, and emotionally touching.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell
The Black Mirror series is worth watching, although they seem to focus mostly on 'digital consciousness'. The USS Callister episode is not only gripping but very funny too. So many great episodes though - hard to pick a real standout although I would have to say if I had to San Junipero is one of the best things I have ever watched.
Then there's the really cheesy old "so bad it's good" stuff, for example: - When Worlds Collide (1951) - The People That Time Forgot (1977) - Swamp Thing (1982)
Have you seen the original War of the Worlds?
Then there is the Alien franchise, Aliens (Alien 2) being my personal favourite - Bill Paxton is sooo funny in that and of course it's directed by James Cameron. Some other great actors like Michael Biehn too.
Have you watched the series Firefly? Also the (related) movie Serenity.
There is soooo much great stuff out there!
I don't know, after seeing "Be Right Back" episode of Black Mirror (episode 1 season 2), get really close to living after your death.
> So what can we do about it? I have no idea
Since you admit to this why are you applauding broad application of draconian law to address the problem? This reminds me of the last episode of this past season of Black Mirror -- the UN mandates that 'containers' for artificial consciousness contain at least five emotes (woefully inadequate) and simultaneously that artificial consciousness cannot be terminated; effectively trapping people in hell. Reacting to every manufactured media panic, running to the bedroom of your parents (government) and asking them to protect you from the monsters under your bed is the true problem here.
very freaky!!!
Was reading this right as the song came on in an episode of Black Mirror
Black Mirror Season 4: maybe a spoiler?
In season 4 of Black Mirror, every branded piece of tech was Apple. That's just an example. There was an instance where the Apple logo was featured fully on the screen for a fraction of a second. An entire episode leveraged the creepy factor of Boston Dynamics. This obviously an extreme example but imagine every Netflix show is wall to wall Apple products. In the age of chord cutters this becomes a rather powerful tool to have.
Just watched the last season of 'Black Mirror'- the one episode with the Bees on it. Incidents like these surely triggers persons like me to think that somebody please start building artificial alternatives to bees and avoid the Colony Collapse Disorder from happening.
The methodology shows the position of power that companies collecting data inevitably leverage:
Tinder doesn't supply any statistics or analytics about member usage so I had to collect this data myself. The most important data I needed was the percent of men that these females tended to “like”. I collected this data by interviewing females who had “liked” a fake Tinder profile I set up. I asked them each several questions about their Tinder usage while they thought they were talking to an attractive male who was interested in them. Lying in this way is ethically questionable at best (and highly entertaining), but, unfortunately I had no other way to get the required data.
Netflix's recently released (Dec 29) Black Mirror season 4 episode 4 "[explored] Tinder and Siri-like technologies": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ_(Black_Mirror)
Well I disagree.
There are many ways to disprove such video, and if the technology exists, we already know that it exists, so it will make any video, real or not, much less relevant.
The tale of new technology bringing war and mayhem might make sense, but in reality it doesn't. You just wish it would happen, because you might want to have some fiction that says "what if?", but it's just a wish. It's also why I dislike black mirror as a tv show. Distopian science fiction is boring most of the time.
I think we need to be careful about integrating blockchain into the fabric of societies, especially the social and emotional aspects.
'Think not of how to replumb or rewire the world, but how to create the environment where interactions can be different, social, within a new economic order.'
This gets me thinking of the episode Fifteen Million Merits (S1, Ep2) of Black Mirror.
Race? What are you talking about? Black mirror is a TV series.
I'm reminded of a Black Mirror episode!
Sounds like a black mirror episode...
Sounds like a good idea for a credit rating company, it might certainly be more transparent than current ones. Or, Black Mirror series 3 episode 1, it's a fine line.
"rate its citizens": The 'that black mirror episode!' clickbait
"The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents": The more accurate subtitle, which you can now see since you gave us your click. Gotcha!
Credit rating is nothing new, be it for people, corporations or even countries.
So China thought that the plot of a Black Mirror episode[1] was a great idea to enact in reality? Spectacular.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
Sounds like a great Black Mirror episode. Just imagine if that algorithm was paid for by the cosmetics industry to sell make up and face cream.
> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives
Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!
This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/present-day-party.html
Obligatory reference to Black Mirror's Nosedive episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where you could block people. Sounds horrible.
This sounds like a Black Mirror episode. A large kennel where tens of thousands of dogs are kept with Amazon Cloud Cams streaming their videos to their "families."
I've observed elsewhere that the reason this is different is also the reason they couldn't use footage from "Hated In The Nation" (the Black Mirror episode you're thinking of)
Hated In The Nation hypothesises that a lone nutter repurposes existing non-lethal technology to kill people. No explosives, just drill your way into the brain through the ear because the robots are replacements for flying insects.
A law saying "Don't make killer robots" is useless in the Black Mirror scenario, nobody made killer robots except the lone nutjob they're already hunting for murder. So for this campaign it's an unhelpful message, it suggests their campaign would be futile.
Is this a leak of Black Mirror Season 4?
I, too, look forward to season 4 of Black Mirror.
Fair enough, technology has always been around. If you look at the history of cryptography, same. Cryptography is very old as well.
However it has become increasingly dominant over our lives with the invention of things like the Internet, computer, car, smartphone, magnetron, and a whole plethora of inventions which I cannot even fathom.
Take for example a very obvious example: electronic voting. It has to do with technology and politics. Should we avoid discussing that? Should we avoid discussing the privacy topics of Facebook? Google? Should we avoid all the topics brought up by a series such as Black Mirror? [1]
And why is it that with non-political topics (as for as these exist) we should be allowed to vote on them, whereas as soon as politics get somehow involved it should be avoided on HN? And, since politics isn't a clear proposition, where do we draw the line?
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/
sounds like an episode from black mirror.
Sounds like the script of a Black Mirror episode.
This would make an incredible Black Mirror episode.
Yes, I think it would make a really great plot for a Black Mirror episode!
This would be a cool black mirror episode. All the billboards are just white with large black font: "COKE". "FARMERS INSURANCE". Or maybe instead of brands you just get assigned some short ID. EAT SUGAR CEREAL#21. TV commercials can only have average looking actors dispassionately read off product features that have been empirically validated by a third party. Store shelves just have Dharma Initiative style plain cardboard boxes. There would be high stakes government run double-blind tests to determine the best drive through burger or shower gel. It'd be great.
Reminds me of the gamer episode of Black Mirror.
I guess the main issue is the media will drum up some moral panic about undesirables using devices like this, to record clips of children or whatever.
I've often thought about a device that would catalogue my life, what I did, be intelligent enough to group events together etc, have a searchable index of time, places, people. But the ethical implications of this are just too great, and effects on society would shift in strange ways. There was an episode of Black Mirror a few years ago that explored this, in some ways it is "be careful what you wish for"
Its like a real-life implementation of that life-score episode of Black Mirror (and what the chinese government is looking to do to their entire population.
When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews.
Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day.
I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given.
Then they attempted to recruit me for the same position for the next four years on three separate occasions.
I told them the story of my first experience, and then they'd say "yeah let me check..." then get back to me and say "sorry, we wont interview you for this position", again, no reason given.
Then they called me one more time, for same damn position. I told them "Ill make this simple, just give me the damn job or stop freaking calling me"
They finally stopped calling me.
Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.
You may be alluding to it, but Black Mirror has an episode that features the fallout of such a technology already. I believe it was in the first season.
When the video ended, I thought I just watched the introduction to a new Black Mirror episode. Really didn't feel at ease.
It sometimes amazes me how relevant and near term black mirror was/is. I think it was season 1, episode 3: "the entire history of you".
Exactly. This is a step (or more likely - leap) towards the bizarre future portrayed in Black Mirror episode "Nosedive".
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
Would you agree that the tv show "Black Mirror" (on Netflix) has at least probed into the future of science fiction?
reminds me of the 1st episode of the latest Black Mirror season.
Black Mirror had an episode where this went horribly wrong.
"Fifteen Million Merits", an episode of Black Mirror, went pretty much half-way there.
"The Waldo Moment" (Black Mirror) comes to mind.
Also speaking of Black Mirror, the first episode specifically, and the real world news story that reminded everyone of that episode… I'm sure David Cameron would love to unleash his inner pig :D
After the news like that Black Mirror episode s03e01 "Nosedive" does not seem that far-fetched.
By the time we get the technology to do that, we could probably build an AI pratchett that generates great works perfectly within his style and quality. Like that black mirror episode but slightly less creepy.
Sometimes I wish life was just like that Black Mirror episode with reputation scores for everybody. Nobody wants to cooperate because there is hardly any long term reputation to worry about when interacting with most people (ie cutting off that car in the highway, being rude to that stranger next to you)
Black Mirror, season 3, episode 1... anyone? -- Everyone can rank each other, which yields to a publicly visible score. Interactions then become about creating "meaningful" and kind experiences. Counter-opinion, argumentative/confrontation, and (sometimes) truthiness are mostly shunned.
"exaggerated morality play about the dangers of conformity and the small pleasures of individuality". - The Verge
Great plot for Black Mirror episode.
Not literature per se, but two episodes of Black Mirror come to mind:
"Hated in the Nation." Online mobs lead to death in real life because of a scifi twist involving artificial swarms/hives of bees. I won't get into details so as not to spoil the ending, but it deals rather directly with the issues raised in the article.
"Nosedive." Less directly related, but hits the nail on the head with respect to the employment concerns raised by the article.
It's one of those stories where I'm glad I saw it, but the experience was pretty uncomfortable. I've seen a few of the other Black Mirror episodes but not all of them yet, because I've got to be in that right state of mind to steel myself against it.
Kinda masochistic!
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll try and remember that one next time I've got the groove.
Indeed, it is very frightening what the companies can do with user's data. While in U.S, the data of a user may reside in the cloud of multiple companies and needs to be aggregated to be useful, in China, companies like Tencent knows about almost everything about every user: your IM messages, your purchases, the movies/music you like, the news you read, your geolocation. I cannot imagine what they are capable of with all those data. Think black mirror.
OK, this comment deserves a Black Mirror episode all its own, or at least a skit in Portlandia, and I don't mind taking the karma nosedive that will result from pointing that out.
I'd say that more than 1 company would be delighted to implement the black mirror episode: live in a box, 1-click order stuff delivered to your box, Pay if you Do Not want... some stuff.
I wondered this awhile back. albeit I took it in a different direction...
I think that social media already gives you opportunities to do things when you login with your social media account. I think in the future (and probably already happening) you get discounts for sharing your social media data and that higher classes (or wealthier people) can afford to not share that information which is why they will not use it. I do not think it will get to the point like it did in 15 million merits (see Black Mirror episode) but something along those lines, specifically money allows you to save time and 'purchase' privacy by not having to use these things that require your privacy in order to use because you can afford not to.
note: I deleted my facebook in 2008. I lost touch with a number of people, but the time I saved has been immeasurable.
This would make a good Black Mirror episode.
I remember me and others, on HN years ago, complaining about how Netflix was investing too much money into TV and original TV while skimping on its streaming movie catalog (this was around the time its STARZ deal was ending). Turns out their strategy was exactly right. I like watching movies, but nothing gets my return visits like serial TV, such as "Breaking Bad" and "Walking Dead". Investing so much money into "House of Cards" seemed bizarre 5 years ago but now that Netflix has so much exclusive content, it's hard as a longtime subscriber to just quit it. even as someone who now subscribes to Amazon Prime and HBO. I actually like Amazon Prime's library, which can be augmented with content I buy from Amazon separately, enough to quit Netflix. But my parents really like the Netflix shows (and I'll admit to binge watching HoC, as shallow as it is), which is something Prime or HBO will never have.
edit: besides the Netflix-conceived shows, e.g. HoC and "Narcos", there are the Netflix-bought shows, such as Arrested Development and Black Mirror, and what seems like countless comedy specials, such as Louis CK 2017. Back when I thought HoC was a poor investment, I was thinking that one really great show a year wouldn't be enough to keep me subscribing year after year. But Netflix seems to be introducing exclusive content several times a month.
black mirror season 3 episode 1!
...and then you can record anything you see, and then here is a way to rewatch it, and then it's a black mirror episode.
Paranoia apart, I'll tend to agree with other comments here.
A device like Google glasses, well why not after all, since you can choose to put them in a drawer (not debating on the fact that you potentially record other people, which is really bad). But having a device you might loose control over and can't switch off ?
It's like those webcam on laptop that can be switch on by a hacker or your OS without you knowing it. First thing I do is to put a paper on it.
Security matters. And I'm finally perhaps a bit paranoid after all.
I'd be curious how, in your model, you'd moderate personal behaviors to tune macro results between social harmony and everyone being a low level sociopath. Historically, peer pressure and social moores provided that functionality.
Isn't there a Black Mirror episode about this with social capital? [+]
[+] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
The sixth episode of the third season of Black Mirror has drones performing the jobs of bees. I think it's quite relevant to the general public of HN (like most Black Mirror episodes, actually).
I first read this theory in the book Calculating God, but it has also appeared in the Hyperion book series. I recently saw it in Black Mirror season 3 (for humanity).
Not exactly a new theory. Still has the problem of the exponential population expansion (in any form like probe or seeding or terraforming or colonization) leaving physical traces everywhere...if they were even marginally successful beyond an origin galaxy. The universe has been around a loooooooooooooooo...ng time.
Oh man, if you haven't seen that black mirror episode, you should stop any other binge watching and watch it.
It's amazing.
Watch Black Mirror's episode "Fifteen Million Merits"...
There was basically an episode of Black Mirror about this
Random Non sequitur: I love Black Mirror but for the most part it concentrates on possible negative consequences of future tech. Episode S01E03 in particular concentrated on the possible negative consequences of having always on eye based video cameras that record your life 24/7 (or at least while your eyes are open). That reality doesn't seem too far away. 5 to 15 years? Maybe not implanted eyes by then but some fashionable version of Snapchat Spectacles.
If that world ever comes to pass what would be the positive consequences if any. Would it solve most sexual harassment issues since in that world most sexual harassment would be recorded? How often would it be clear sexual harassment vs individual interpretation?
While on the topic of individual interpretation you might find this season of The Heart interesting.
http://www.theheartradio.org/no-episodes/
>There is a Black Mirror episode around that called 'Be right back'.
Well, they were approximations based on people's social media presence, and the episode's conflict mainly came from the imperfection of the approximation. I think you get a very different set of cultural conflicts if the simulation is of an accurate copy of the mind (issues more like in the book Permutation City).
The question you should ask is would Feynman have agreed to it?
Because that's the person who will have to put up with it. You can only ask such a question if you're willing to give the future recipient of the gift the option to back out and be sent back to your present state. And if that new individual isn't 'you' in a legal sense you might find that contract nul and void anyway.
> Where it gets really strange is if you think of your wife or husband making a backup of their brain, then running a simulator on that backup.
There is a Black Mirror episode around that called 'Be right back'.
There's a Black Mirror episode about this, but saying which episode it is would be a big spoiler. Just watch the whole series if you haven't.
Some ingredients for a always recording society...
- Super cheap and gigantic capacity storage.
- Wireless network like 5G.
- Wireless charging.
- Nano cameras.
I think there was a Black Mirror episode about this.
If anyone hasn't seen the Black Mirror bees episode, please do. It's great.
Sometimes I think people need a little more "Black Mirror" to see how bad this is. One of the episodes has random people basically constantly looking at and filming a woman everywhere; certainly no less than what Facebook does every day, yet somehow it doesn't seem weird to anyone?
Reference to an episode of "Black Mirror"
The Black Mirror episode about exactly this got it right, I think.
Forgetfulness is a blessing!
I can only assume that you have never worked in any industry in a customer service capacity. Tipping is a totally normal thing, that you are free to engage in or abstain from.
If you are especially pleased with a service on a particular occasion, then you should tip. If you are the type of person who is never pleased with anything, then you should certainly feel no obligation to tip, ever.
This whole exchange reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror.
* (edit: Then again, after reading some more of the impressions on this page, I think I may be privileged that I am in a relatively small midwestern city where Uber and Lyft both offer service. I have never been asked to tip, by any of the drivers I've used on either service. It sounds like that is far from the norm, at least in areas where HN users are.)
The first thing I thought of was the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror this season. Seems more and more plausible every day.
> unless you find that all of those free sources including BBC, AP, etc are so bad that they provide negative value and just waste your time then it's in your best interest (infinite ratio) to try to get by with those free sources
So, like the GP said, that's "a broken definition of 'value'" on the face!
Wouldn't you at least concede that if some sources do in fact provide negative value, it might be preferred to connect those sources that do consistently provide value, directly with even some small reward (like a subscription, maybe a per-article cost) in exchange for consistently providing positive value?
How do content creators make a return on their investments, is it meant to be indirectly, through advertising, or is it some other way I haven't thought of that will recoup their costs)
This is all nonsense anyway and I don't believe any of it. Information has to be free, and it's either all free or none of it is. The paywall is wrong, if it seeks to prevent us from sharing information then it will fail, and Google, a part of the system of freedom, is properly set up to route around the damage of censorship inflicted by asserters of copyrights. The paywalls that don't provide free information, moved down or were delisted in the rankings like I think should happen.
If growth in your business model depends on broadening the subscriber-ship and thus reach of your own information, but also on limiting the proliferation of your own information, then it is wrong too. I don't know what this means for news media companies that have to turn a profit for their shareholders; I guess I can safely say their concerns are not my concerns.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch another episode of Black Mirror.
This definitely sounds like a service a lot of people could benefit from, and I wish you the best of luck, but my mind went straight to White Christmas episode of Black Mirror...
Hello Black Mirror Episode
You should check out the latest black mirror episode.
There's an episode of Black Mirror that protrays something akin to it, season 3 episode 1, somewhat like China's citizenship score.
Lots of Black Mirror is commentary on where we are now, not where we're going, even if the episode itself is set in future (15 Million Merits is an easy example).
Regrets about building small autonomous drones that later end up killing people? That was a Black Mirror episode (albeit not the best episode):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation_(Black_Mirror)
Well, this article brings a very insightful perspective into view. It's not often you come across content that might profoundly affect your world views!
Also, at the opposite end of the spectrum here is a reference to a show called 'Black Mirror' with an episode which is about the need to constantly be seeking other peoples approval (for self-esteem boosting):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
I highly recommend watching this, very sobering.
I think I've seen this Black Mirror episode.
Black Mirror episode:
PR disaster happens at 40,000 feet and gets recorded by smartphones. Since they're still in the air the footage hasn't been uploaded to the internet yet.
The on-board AI supercomputer makes the determination that the negativity of a plane crash would be less than if the footage leaks out so it decides to crash itself in order to maximize profits.
The obvious next step is to create a real-time market for employee performance reviews, allowing employees to bet on and against their and other employees' performance reviews and possibly even trade derivatives priced based on baskets of rising or falling performance reviews.
There would be many benefits. For starters, having a liquid, efficient market for performance reviews in which employees are able to bet on each others' reviews with minimal frictional costs would unleash market forces that would keep the performance reviews accurate (right?). But the really big payoff would come down the road, when this market could be opened to external investors like the venerable firm that manages your Aunt Tilly's pension plan, generating new sources of trading revenues for Goldman.
In all seriousness, I'm not sure real-time performance reviews are a good idea. They immediately bring to mind the societal nightmare of Black Mirror's "Nose Dive" episode: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-mirror-season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap
I can respect your experience, and in fact it mirrors mine, in that any review process invented by HR inevitably becomes a broken, gamed system, with limited value.
Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly.
This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
umm the muting part reminds me of the black mirror episode "white christmas". Hopefully it doesnt come to that
aaaaand keep the episodes of Black Mirror rollin'
> Maybe originality now requires a longer format than the one-off film. Consider Game of Thrones.
Not necessarily, see "Black mirror" :)
<Black Mirror spoiler>
This is just like that one episode of Black Mirror where they implant that game AI into the guys head!!
The [Black Mirror][1] (British science fiction television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker) has a few episodes dealing with AI and brain-machine interfaces.
It is very interesting to watch some of the emotional and social implications this kind of technology will bring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror
I personally have no interest in PHP or BDSM but I think really everyone who wants to participate in Open Source Software in 2017 should be paying attention to this along with other instances where people have been kicked/banned from projects alongside public accusations against them. Especially if you have been participating in online communities for a while, your conversations have probably been archived and are open to scrutiny based moral standards that are constantly changing, both in terms of who is applying them to the project, and changes in the views of each individual. And when I say your conversations, I mean both conversations that you've held in public-ish settings and also conversations that you believed to be private that could be forwarded or screenshot without your knowledge or consent. Or conversations where you believed you were pseudo-anonymous where your identity was later reveled.
Also, given international participation of many projects, the moral inquisitors may hold views that are significantly different than anyone you've ever met or interacted with in a non-technical setting.
I think the TV show Black Mirror should be shown in high schools as an educational video.
I can't speak to Sherlock Holmes, but Season 3 of Black Mirror is extraordinary. Nosedive could have been edited down substantially, but so could White Christmas or Fifteen Million Merits from the seasons before. I don't agree at all that there was any Netflix degradation.
Abstract is triple-A. A Chef's Table is triple-A. Stranger Things is triple-A.
We all have a sort of cynical habit of presuming that things once were good, and now they aren't. But Netflix has always been a mix of good and bad original content, especially when viewed from the subjective eye that what some of us think is great others think is terrible. They're trying to serve all markets.
> Compare the Netflix versions of Black Mirror and Sherlock Holmes with the ones put out by the BBC
Black Mirror was never made by the BBC, and all episodes of Sherlock were made by the BBC not by Netflix, so neither of your examples make any sense and don't allow you to compare what you are saying they would.
This could be a plot for a future episode of Black Mirror....
Isn't this an episode of black mirror?
The privacy implications of this are quite horrible. If you read the Google privacy notice, you'll see that Google tracks and records the activity of your child.
https://families.google.com/familylink/privacy/child-policy/
The reactions in this thread and across the tech community toward Google are just baffling to me. There is a strong double standard.
Microsoft and Facebook are, quite rightly, criticised and scrutinised over the amount and the degree of tracking they undertake. Meanwhile, Google, who capture unimaginably humongous amounts of data on users, escapes any scrutiny.
From ChromeOS (an entire OS that tracks everything you do, and one heavily used in schools) to GMail and Google Analytics and CDNs, Google's digital fingerprints can be found in every corner of the web.
It's no longer an exaggeration to say we live in a time when millions of people are tracked online from childhood to death. This isn't a dystopian episode of Black Mirror, but real life.
I don't blame ordinary users for not fully understanding the privacy implications and the myriad and insidious ways they are tracked. But what excuse does the tech community have for giving Google a free pass on matters of privacy and online tracking?
Probably one of my favorite black mirror episodes involves exploring the consequences of anonymity on the internet and the (deadly) consequences. Worth seeing that one I think, because after I watched, I wasn't sure if I'd be one to join in the fray in the crowd, and the only thing stopping me is the idea that I might be caught and punished, and so what does that say about me?
Uh oh, now they're going to need to re-film the Black Mirror "Nosedive" episode (s3e1) using thumbs-up/down instead of 5-star ratings...
> This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class.
Not dying, but the abundant talent shows where a whole generation seems to sacrifice all regular career ambition for a nonexistent fairy tale already comes close. On the other hand, maybe the kids somehow have a very prophetic hunch that taking a crapshot at becoming the nation's "next top model" or whatever will eventually turn out to be a less terrible bet than fighting for scraps in an environment of increasingly automation-driven capitalism that simply does not need them anymore.
The Black Mirror episode (spoilers!) with the training bikes nailed that quite well. When I watched it I was disappointed with the implausibility of a high tech society powered by the meagre 2 kWh you might realistically extract from a human per day. But this could actually be a subtle point made by the authors: the bikes are not really powering their economy, they are just a semi-plausible bullshit job made up in-world to make handouts look like a hard-earned wage, probably intended to fool those spinning the bikes as much as the elite who enjoys having the plebs nicely boxed up out of sight in underground caverns.
is this a black mirror episode quotes?
Kind of like in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror? [1]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
That's kind of digital terrorism really, take drastic measures that effect people at an individual level to get people to notice your cause. Though, might be very effective.
reminds me of this episode of black mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror)
Reminds me of a Black Mirror episode... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/?ref_=ttep_ep3
That episode of Black Mirror is coming to mind for me with this discussion. Once the currency of your profile rating points affects your livelihood all sorts of bizarre social ramifications start to rear their heads. The difference between a 4.5 out of 5 and a 5 out of 5 becomes huge.
Also check out the AI / Cognitive Science Movie Index by Indiana University:
https://www.indiana.edu/~cogfilms/index.php
Black Mirror is missing here too, unfortunately. Several episodes revolve quite intelligently around AI, dystopian technological future, cognitive science.
It would be nice to include Black Mirror as most of the show's plots revolve around the social influence of advanced technology.
Not a movie but definitely required viewing.
Wasn't this an episode of Black Mirror?
>>My guess is a lot of people probably do this to bump up their social status a bit.
I had thought the Black Mirror episode titled "Nose Dive" was a bit silly at first, but as usual with that series, it 's turning out to be pretty prescient
I think a recent Black Mirror episode dealt with this exact subject.
We need John ham in that black mirror Christmas episode..
And ascribing too much importance to social network reputation leads to a great episode of Black Mirror, hardly a desirable world to live in though.
Wow. That's almost straight out of an episode of Black Mirror [1]. Looks like the episode premiered just days before the news story came out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror)
There was a Black Mirror episode called Nosedive that partially covered the topic of Social Score.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
Depending on the episode, Black Mirror uses tons of CGI, but it's usually subtle and the focus is always the story, which is simply served by the effects, not the other way around.
> Viewers today expect incredible production value.
Not really, no. I expect interesting movies, and I'd say being an interesting movie doesn't have anything to do with CGI. I'm a film buff through and through and it almost literally pains me when I see that people involved in the movie industry don't seem to understand what their problem is: they don't make films for grown-ups anymore.
The only outlet that has provided interesting movie-like content in the last 10-15 years was television. There's almost no CGI in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Black Mirror (to just name a few), shows that have made me casually think about them while I was riding the tramway and the like years after I had last seen them.
I miss great movies.
Ha--exact the same three. Plus one more, I think, though I can't remember which one right now.
On the other hand, I've been hooked to The Man in the High Castle, Black Mirror, strings of documentaries and cartoons bought through iTunes, et cetera.
Hey that's an episode from Black Mirror!
There's a Black Mirror episode vaguely describing what that future might look like.
>>we can make enough of them fast enough to counter the disappearance of honeybees
Black Mirror Series 03 "Hated in the Nation"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709236/?ref_=ttep_ep6
Black mirror episodes are often very divisive. I found the season to be pretty good, though a bit kinder and gentler than before.
After loving the first 2 seasons of Black Mirror I couldn't watch the 1st episode of the 3rd season till the end (this one was Netflix produced).
It's more like there was always a lot of pent-up supply of amazing content available. The reason the supply was not finding an outlet was because of the problem that such content doesn't have the mass appeal required to be a hit show on non-premium cable (or, god forbid, a theatrical release movie). So the outlets were limited. HBO was one such premium outlet but it was always limited by the number of primetime hours in the day because of the cable based business model (still is).
Netflix comes along and starts ordering shows where they know the target audience is going to be very limited, say only 10% of all college graduates from big metro areas. That's enough for a show to be Netflix success. Some of them they contract with US production companies (House of Cards, OIT New Black etc.), others they source from non-US TV networks (Sherlock, Black Mirror etc.)
If they have enough of these shows, they can cover most of their target audience and make sure that most people have at least a few original shows keeping them hooked to the $10/month subscription. There's no limit on airtime since Netflix is all on-demand. So now there are dozens (or who knows, even hundreds) of these shows and all they need for you is to get hooked on one or two of those. And a few of them have been legitimate breakout hits like House of Cards, Stranger Things, OITNB etc. Maybe individually none of those shows is as big as Game of Thrones, but combined, they're obviously doing a great job for Netflix.
For HBO to truly compete with Netflix, they'll have to break their "Cable first" model and truly start thinking in terms of unlimited online hours. We'll see when they release their first online only show.
New episode of Black Mirror or maybe some comedy sketch.
"Your face is too generic that the AI drew you as all of our suspects."
The Black Mirror episode "Hated in the Nation" explores a similar idea.
this very much reminds me of the TV show episode black mirror - san junipero
All I can picture here is two clunky headsets colliding in awkward fashion.
There was an episode of Black Mirror that dealt with this though, using AR contact lenses instead.
Truly dystopian. Reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" (Season 3, Episode 1), but worse.
That's why I love "Black Mirror". They tackled the risk of class breaks in the episode called "Hated in the Nation" (season 3, episode 6) and they did it in such a way that everyone can understand the problem, not just us computer geeks.
Somewhat related, my son showed me a program from Britain called "Black Mirror" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror) The shows are an hour or so long, and it's not a series with a long-running plot, but each episode is separate (à la The Twilight Zone). We watched one called "Nosedive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive), which was set in a future dystopia where everybody was socially rated and that rating was visible to others. Remember the almost-startup from last year, Peeple.com? Yikes!
The San Junipero episode of Black Mirror nailed it--limiting people's time in VR to avoid "side effects". That show is just hauntingly prescient with its straddle between what's possible now and what's just-slightly-out-of-reach.
Growing numbers of people preferring an alternative reality is scary to me. And the idea that it may cause a psychological break with reality for a significant number of people is even scarier--as if we need more people disassociated and thus capable of committing heinous or anti-social acts.
Strange that we're just cruising into this with little alarm. Stranger still that we don't find any issue with a relatively small number of people literally jockeying to redefine reality for the masses for commercial gain.
The times they are a changin'.
Reminds me of the third episode of Black Mirror:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
Similar, but in the case of the episode you could also replay every interaction you had with other people... Was that a slight frown before they smiled?
Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1
There was already a ransomware episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror)
This sounds like the beginnings of a future Black Mirror episode.
Black Mirror shows AR prominently in about 1/3 of it's episodes.
Unless the Black Mirror episode aired before 2013, the greentext predates it.
http://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF
Greentext? It was a Black Mirror episode.
It'll be interesting to see how well they pull this off. I read the novel and enjoyed it, although not as much as I had (hoped|expected|whatever) based on the premise. Still, the movie adaptation should have a chance to be pretty interesting.
And on a sorta related note... I just started watching Black Mirror and halfway though episode one (if not earlier), I was thinking "this is like The Circle by Dave Eggers".
> “You sell part of your soul. Because no matter what beautiful moment you enjoy in your life, you’re going to want to take a photo and share it. Distinguishing between when is it my life and when am I creating content is a really big burden.”
I didn't realize just how realistic that Black Mirror episode was.
My wife and I were just talking about this today, coincidentally.
She follows a few people around the world who are artists or collectors on IG. She pointed out to me that when she started following some of them more than a year ago, they had a few hundred followers, and were posting general stuff, but which all felt heartfelt and 'in the moment'. I think 'genuine' was the word my wife used. Kids doing silly things. Artwork in various stages of completion, etc.
But now, she has noticed a couple of them have rocketed to over hundreds of thousands of followers, and their posts have changed to become quite soulless and fake. Obviously they have been engaged by a marketing or promotional company that sanitises and sets up their posts for them.
All of a sudden, an artist who was formerly struggling to raise a family and make meaningful work is announcing (and posting photos) that they are in [insert brand name here] health spa having a weekend pampering. Continuous shots of not the art or kids, but of bath products, massage companies, drink companies etc. all heavily hashtagged. Following up a few days later are pictures of the kids, but this time around a brand new laptop with the manufacturers name and laptop model hashtagged to the hilt.
As @sAbakumoff pointed out here - this is "Black Mirror" Season 3 Episode 1 come to life. I have nothing against someone doing promotional work to earn money to live, but I do have a problem with people portraying a totally fake and unrealistic life as a reality.
We are just seeing magazines starting to push back against "Generation Photoshop" and go back to 'real' shots of people again (Pirelli 2017 calendar a case in point), but are we now going to replace Photoshop with 'posed reality'? I know a lot of us do that to a certain extent on social media anyway, but not for discounts or monetary compensation, usually.
This was an episode in the latest season of black mirror
I was just thinking about the recent Black Mirror episode about how easy it is for a hivemind of righteous (or totally false wacko) anger to appear and make victims.
The way twitter/4chan/facebook work is that it's basically a streaming tube of recency, where content gets pushed through it and everyone is forced to look at the top of the heap, ie the newest memes.
If you actually had a graph the size of your network, and the font size of the comments/content your friends' post actually reflect their voice in context of the whole network (e.g. smaller), maybe you'd see it less as a spotlight and more as background noise.
3 hours by car is likely minimum 60 miles which is 4 hours by bike every single day minimum. If they're getting to highway speeds at all then it's even worse. It'd be like black mirror episode 2 every day
Are you saying Google loses money on gmail? I can't see that being possible. It displays ads. It harvests incredible amounts of information, on "users" as a whole and individual users. It's a treasure trove of data on how people engage with each other, businesses, etc. It's a stepping stone into the large Google ecosystem where you can and do pay for things.
Gmail is just as valuable to Google as it is to any individual user. I'm not sure why people's gmail accounts would ever be banned. If people do something illegal, prosecute them. Even if they're found guilty, it's not like the court is going to delete their email address or take away where they live.
This feels like an episode of Black Mirror.
>there's a total shutdown of public discourse as most people won't go on record to say anything that might not be consistent with the party line.
>...driving anyone with a deviant opinion behind closed doors. Soon enough, everyone is screaming into an echo chamber.
Funny, I've always thought downvotes on HN encouraged the same, albeit to a lesser degree. It's one thing to use downvotes as a moderation tool, submerging comments from others with whom you don't agree. It's another thing to "penalize" (FWIW) a person because you disagree with him/her. That it seems acceptable is a smaller symptom of the bigger problem.
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode #1 this season.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
If you want to watch something to spook you out of your 'social media' approval ratings, watch this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/
It's an episode of the Series 'Black Mirror'. Well worth the watch.
It's almost like that episode of Black Mirror where you get grayed out when you do too many unpopular things..
Oh wait, it's a terrible show that isn't accurate in any way.
Black Mirror is less ham-fisted, more black comedy (no pun intended) in most episodes. (especially Nosedive)
Black Mirror's episode about "Waldo" could be very easily connected to Trump.
Bit of an anti-advertisement: the article contains spoilers for a lot of the episodes, making watching them for the twist a bit pointless.
I still want to watch Black Mirror at some point; I'm lucky that I have a terrible memory for spoilers ;)
Is this an advertisement for black mirror? All I see is one intro paragraph bashing Trump and then a summary of popular episodes. Nice stealth advertisement.
This basically is a set of summarizations of episodes Black Mirror. You should really watch Black Mirror before you read this piece. The idea of good SciFi is that is supposed to parallel reality so that you can suspend your disbelief and all the article does is attempt to make those connections that the authors put in intentionally.
>"quality" users
There was a Black Mirror episode about this in season 3. Seems it was on point.
This is genuinely scary, black mirror tv episode -ish.
Future Trumps can follow some algorithm to have maximum appeal to voters ..
It's probably not quite as rosy as you state here, I'm afraid.
Let's look at a 380,000 viewer show. It's very unlikely that ever single one of those viewers paid for Netflix for a solid year just to get access to that show (which will have all its episodes released at once).
So let's assume it has significant cult appeal, meaning a full 25% of its viewers are primarily subscribed for that show and things like it. (I'd say that's likely to be very high, based on my experience in the narrative video world, but let's be optimistic.) And let's say, based on subscribing for that show and forgetting to cancel for a couple of months (or subsequently being retained by another 380k viewer show), that Netflix gets 3 months' worth of revenue from them.
So that's 380k/4 = 95,000 * $7.99 * 3 = $2.28m revenue attributable to that show.
Of the shows you mention:
Marco Polo cost $90m to produce for the entire season.
Black Mirror doesn't have figures online, but it'll be around $3m per episode if it's similar to other BBC shows. So that's $18m.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesn't have figures available, but based on Tina Fey's fees for other shows and general knowledge of how much TV costs, I'll guess at about $3m an episode. (Might be cheaper if they're being clever about it, so could be as low as $2m) So that's $39m.
So, assuming that Netflix are just getting revenue from retained subscribers, and they get the figures above, we're looking at losses of:
$88m for Marco Polo.
$16m for Black Mirror.
$37m for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Obviously the situation is far more complex than that - they'll be financing with coproduction deals, they're looking for growth rather than revenue, they also acquire a lot of content cheaply (very, very cheaply in some cases) through licensing - but it's certainly not rosy enough that they'll be happy with 380k viewers for shows they're making.
I just watched the Season 3 of Black Mirror, which gives a totally different perspective to this article
I do not enjoy watching Black Mirror , yet I do watch it.To make me realize that all the technology boom/bubble right now can go bad too. One of the my favourite parts about the series is that it focuses on one technology at a time. Had they focussed on multiple advancements of tech,they would be as unbelievable and superficial like other sci-fi shows.
But the real world has multiple technologies intermingled with each other. The point I am trying to make here:
While we think Black Mirror is bad enough (I cannot watch watch more than one episode at a time),what will happen in reality could be much worse.
"Black Mirror" is dark sci-fi. I do most of my video watching before bed, but that doesn't work for Black Mirror. There is so little quality in television series that I'll take whatever quality I can get. I don't like gratuitous violence, sex, or comic relief - and that rules out 3/4 of all programming. I find Black Mirror to be worth the investment of my time.
It got the dichotomy right - the solution for horrible things like PTSD also turned out to be justifying continuation of a horrific crime in its own right. The balance of how technology is amoral and how we use it as a society and for what agendas is illustrated in one of the better ways in this specific episode. The problem I had with the episode is similar to my complaint with all of season 3 - unnecessarily slow pacing and repetition. I'm not seeing the artistic reasons for repeating the same tired gestures in, say, the first episode unless they're more sentimental kind of episodes like San Junipero.
The morality lessons that the Twilight Zone oftentimes preached are manifested more as debates in Black Mirror with season 3, which I think is a lot tougher to write successfully. What is a bit of a letdown is that the debates are mostly contemporary (PTSD wasn't even a term when the Twilight Zone was airing) and will date this specific episode heavily. Meanwhile, most of what I watched in the Twilight Zone is still very relevant from even a thought experiment perspective.
I think I developed a lot more critical thinking watching Twilight Zone episodes as a child than anything I had to read in school.
I'm not sure if we've been watching the same show. I finished watching the first season this week, and Black Mirror does an amazing job of building characters and forming relationships in a short amount of time.
It does this well because the science fiction elements of the show are not the focus. They are merely instruments for driving very human narratives.
When you say It's shallow intellectually, but it doesn't even have any depth emotionally. At least with most other popular TV shows there's depth in terms of personal relationships. There's drama that's more emotionally interesting. I wish you would use an example so I can understand where you're coming from since I find myself completely on the other side of your comment.
I have to disagree. Fifteen Million Merits is still my favorite episode, and what's more, I don't think it's about the intrusive ranking at all (meta-point: one of the best things about Black Mirror, IMO, is that people will often disagree on not only the quality of an episode, but what the episode was even about. That's how you know it's good).
I think the moral of that story was the inherent futility of ever rebelling against the System. Most people don't try, most who try fail, and even for the one-in-a-million who succeed, the System just instantly reconfigures itself to absorb your rebellion as part of it. Other works have done the "revolutionaries always become the new dictators" shtick, but Fifteen Million Merits did it better because it shows that this process doesn't even require a villain (like in, say, Animal Farm). Everyone in that episode, even the Simon Cowell stand-in, was just punching a clock and doing their job; the suppression of revolt was purely an emergent property of the system... as it usually is in real life.
It was the bleakest, most nihilist bit of television I think I've ever seen, made better by the fact that it wasn't empty "dark for dark's sake" like Twilight Zone-esque twist endings tend to be. I had to go for a walk afterward. I don't see how you can't like it... but like I said, the fact that people can disagree so profoundly is one of the show's best qualities, so I'll upvote you anyway and not hold it against you :)
I found no value in the first two seasons. It's been on the front page of HN at least 4 times in the past couple weeks. I tried watching the third season hoping it was better. It's still stupid. It's like they just take some very plain 1:1 observation about exactly how the world is right now, focus on one specific demographic, then create a skit around it that has no depth. They create imaginary worlds, but they're not very imaginative. They're basically exactly the world we're in, but they replace a few things with something slightly different. It's like science fiction for people who don't really like science fiction.
It's shallow intellectually, but it doesn't even have any depth emotionally. At least with most other popular TV shows there's depth in terms of personal relationships. There's drama that's more emotionally interesting. Black Mirror seems to be optimized for people who are blunted both in terms of intellect and social emotion. It's one of the most boring TV series on Netflix, which is a shame because there's not much else that even attempts to be interesting in a more sci-fi way.
I think the only reason why people find value in Black Mirror must be because of references. Like how they love jokes on Reddit when they refer to something they all know. People must be like, "Ahaha, they're referencing how people are always on their phones. So true. LOL look, it's trollface!! Dude, look, trollface is on TV. I know trollface. Haha this show is great." What else would people be getting out of it?
Honestly? Season 3 seemed the weakest of the bunch but I feel that the final episode made up for the rest. And even a weak Black Mirror episode is still pretty decent if you don't hold it up to the ridiculous standards that seasons 1 and 2 set for the show.
Fully agreed! "The Entire History of You" is when I realized Black Mirror was great. Such an interesting episode -- more about human behavior than about tech, really.
For some reason I also liked the episode's title itself; to me it sounds like a name Neil Gaiman would come up with.
You think that was a worse episode than the first episode of the series? Or The Waldo Moment?
I really think Black Mirror is suffering from the Internet hype machine. If you never saw the show and only read the buzz online you'd think the first 2 seasons were masterclass and this one was a disaster..I thoroughly enjoyed all 3 seasons and thought some episodes were stronger than others but there was no large change in quality between seasons.
There was a trailer a few years back with a bunch of 20-something white gamer dudes in some kind of dystopian future gamer den playing a CoD style shooter, which was in reality --- well, the same plot twist as "Men Against Fire". I thought (a) the trailer was much more evocative than the Man Against Fire episode, and (b) that it was possible that "Man Against Fire" borrowed its idea from that trailer.
Later
Found it! Uncanny Valley:
https://vimeo.com/147365861
I think this is both more plausible and more disturbing than "Men Against Fire". Also: the twist is less apparent --- for most of "Uncanny Valley" (if I'm remembering it clearly), you're not entirely sure whether it's a comment about how games generate dissipation the same way drugs do. "Men Against Fire" is predictable from about minute 10 (after the farm house scene).
Another "Black Mirror" problem I have: the episodes are way too long. "San Junipero" is the only one --- of all the seasons, I think! --- that earned its running length.
> Are people liking the latest season of Black Mirror?
Yes, it's a good one.
> San Junipero, which everyone says is the really good one
Average, by my standards. They had a great premise and all they did with it was tell a love story.
The really good episodes are S03E01 for taking the quantification of social status to an extreme, S03E05 for an interesting take on the banality of evil and S03E06 for managing to be annoyingly moralizing and very well done at the same time.
> I loved the first two seasons because they felt like intelligent, worrying criticisms of futurism, social media and technology
Same here, except S01E01 that had none of those qualities and nothing in common with the rest of the series. If that bland and silly social critique was the basis on which the network ordered an entire season, it was a small miracle.
Wait, what the what? Michael Schur wrote that Black Mirror episode?
I wonder if they were literally inspired by MeowMeowBeenz.
Really? I liked the first episode. What I think is the absolute worst (of all Black Mirror, I'd say!) is the second episode, Playtest. It's embarrassingly bad, completely amateurish, not really scary, too drawn out and with dodgy SFX and a weak premise.
I also didn't like Shut Up & Dance much. To me it felt like a weaker "White Rabbit", and much of the episode hinges on a single plot twist at the end (much like White Rabbit, but that one was better executed).
I liked San Junipero. I liked that it has a different, unexpected tone from the rest. I liked that it was kind-hearted, for a change. Haven't watched the rest of the season yet.
Just my opinions, of course.
Are people liking the latest season of Black Mirror? I'm only three episodes in and haven't yet gotten to San Junipero, which everyone says is the really good one, but so far I've been a little disappointed. This might be regression to the mean, since I felt that the first six episodes were six home runs in a row and it must be tough to keep a streak like that going, but so far season 3 seems to have lost something.
I loved the first two seasons because they felt like intelligent, worrying criticisms of futurism, social media and technology, whereas usually when television tries to do that it's eye-rolling and cringe-worthy. But so far season 3 feels like the Sorkin-esque Boomer slop that I loved the first two seasons for not being. What do other people think?
> Massive, multiplayer video game technology meets the indoor cycling community.
So that's how episode 2 of Black Mirror started.
Reminds me of the episode of 'Black Mirror' called 'Nosedive' where everything in people's life is determined by social media ranking. Creepy.
Apologies.... obligatory reference to Black Mirror. Season 3, Episode 1 'Nosedrive' has covered this to it's dystopian conclusion.
In other news, looking forward to the disruption self driving cars will have on the auto insurance industry.
Looks like episode 1 of this series of Black Mirror has got them spooked. ;-)
Good call by Facebook in my opinion.
Are you kidding me? This was literally the plot of an episode of Black Mirror this season.
I've been binging on Black Mirror episodes. So all this secrecy about whatever they are building is giving me the creeps.
Ha this is on my mind every single time someone brings up Soylent. Seriously, it's a joke. Some kid makes a knock off slimfast meal supplement and HN is all "Goddamn genius is disrupting meals. This is the future man!"
This would make a great Black Mirror episode.
I think this is posted with the recent Black mirror episode as context. Scary.
So let's say we'd make a Black mirror episode about CRISPR. What could it be about? Biomachines making most of our stuff including houses? Designer babies that glow in the dark and can communicate telepathically? Both? 10 other things? Let's choose one. It's difficult enough to imagine the social impact of that. If we choose multiple such inventions in one swoop you would have to make a lot of assumptions that each would be enough content for a single episode. Then audience will no longer be able to use what they know about today's society because they don't know what assumptions the author has made.
edit: I realize I might be overselling a point that you're already agreeing on...
"The problem isn't machines, it's letting machines do your thinking for you." - Leto III (Dune)
A friend suggests that Black Mirror is "about screens". I see what he's saying on a surface level, but, screens are just how we interface with machines doing the thinking for us, instead of people.
On the other hand, isn't bureaucracy a machine, running on meat? "Screens" used to be "Paper" - see the crazy movie "Brazil". Replacing something hard (actually getting to know someone and their situation) with something easy (the output of a system) has been with humanity for a really long time, if not forever.
Most [of the prior] Black Mirror episodes are about, I think, man's inhumanity to man, just mediated by modern technology. Most of them are about some way that people are failing to connect to each other.
I have only watched one of the new episodes.
I think there is more to your comment than initially meets the eye. I've been watching "Black Mirror" the past few days, and the one thing that all episodes share in common when it comes to their futuristic UX is the tremendous expressiveness that they derive from unbelievably simple and quick input methods, where you can clearly see that the user communicated far more intent than even the number of DOF that their supposed input device even allowed. The only thing I can think of as helping to bridge that gap is AI
None were weak, but some may have improved given more time to work on them.
The British way of writing for TV can be quite different from the american one; less concerned about narrative cohesion/logic/dramatic principles and more focused on taking the audience for a crazy ride (see also: Sherlock, Dr. Who).
In Black Mirror s3, the double-twist episode originally only had a single twist according to Charlie. It feels like they tacked on the second twist without adjusting the entire narrative to align with it.
A lot of what's great about Black Mirror is what it doesn't show you. It's great at showing you enough of something to know what's going on, but not hammering it home to make sure you got it like a lesser show might.
As an example, in the first episode of Season 3 (no spoiler here I think) a character leaves an area where there's a billboard with her and a guy on it, and her image fades from it. Personalized images in ads are something we've seen in other media so I'm not claiming the idea is novel, but a lesser show might still have felt the need to show someone else walking up and their image appearing on the billboard, replacing the one that had been there. Black Mirror is content to show the image fade, then cut without replacing it. This is good taste and confidence, and it's one of the show's greatest attributes. It manifests in many small choices like this in every episode.
Similarly, it sometimes uses what it doesn't show us to carry most of the weight of an entire episode's central theme (Fifteen Million Merits does this, for instance). It may also throw sensation at the viewer as a bait, as it pointedly does in The National Anthem, revealing this when the camera chooses to entirely ignore the sensational event toward which the episode has been building to instead show us something both more mundane and far more disgusting in every way that matters. The subjects of that scene push the viewer to reflect on themselves—showing us the watchers when we are watchers—which is one hell of a smart gut-punch.
There are a couple bad episodes, though (well, there was one, but now season 3's out and by my reckoning there are now three), and if I were walking a n00b through the series I'd probably show them the series' first episode last because it's both structurally different from all the rest and I think easier to appreciate when you've got a better feel for what the show's doing. It's a bad introductory episode, IMO.
Time for extrapolation, brain storming, and irrational views of the future.
I remember some years ago reading that many of those social media quizes like "Which [random TV show] character are you" or "if you were a color, what color would you be" are run by companies that are slowly aggregating consumer behavior and background data on everybody.
With access to this database, and a semi-intelligent bot that's been given instructions, one could build an collection of people who meet certain criteria.
You could filter people down to determine who is most easily influenced by peers and have the bot befriend them and act as a peer. This power could be used to simply influence them to have certain consumer behaviors, or it could be used to cause online malcontents to move to the real world and take up arms against governments.
You could filter for people who were "easy targets" to trick them and steal their life savings, or better yet, convince them to send you their life savings.
You could run a fake church and find the people easily swayed by your specific brand of faith or family that they crave.
You could find not just the next lone gunman, you could find a thousand lone gunmen or bombers and set them off all at the same time against a wide variety of targets.
You could convince 10,000 people to invest a pittance into a penny stock to make it soar and cash out.
You could trigger viral boycotts or artificially construct "Grassroots" organizations.
Similar to a recent Black Mirror episode, you could blackmail people but make it automated. Bots could scour the internet for "deviant behavior" in safe pseudo-anonymous communities but connect the profile to real-world profiles and automate threatening them for some kind of action or payout.
On the other hand, many of these things could also be used for good depending on your viewpoint. A true believer in a cause might like the ability to easily find and reach out to people who believe in the same cause to form a grassroots campaign.
A church with low attendance numbers might be able to find more members for their flock.
An intelligent bot system with psychological and marketing profiles on everyone in a country could be used by humanitarians to give certain categories of people (brave, natural leaders with compassion) the prodding and emotional support they need to stand up to militants or warlords.
An automated bot that connects pseudo-anonymous identities with real identities could be used to privately and discretely tell trolls to stop their negative behavior.
If the tool kits arrive, I anticipate a new wild west of uses... negative, positive, and purely exploitative.
4 and 6 were the best and among the top 5 for the series, easily.
1 was my least-favorite episode of the entire series. Flabby editing, could have trimmed a solid 5 minutes, and something about the shot choices and/or the editing made every serious conversation look like watching two people ACTING, which is not a good thing.
5 was a bad episode in an interesting world. If 1 hadn't had technical issues I'd definitely rank this one under it. Story needed more work.
2 and 3 were mid-tier. 2 is pretty much a really great Outer Limits episode and 3 is just... well, Black Mirror. Good, but not amazing like some others in the series.
I'd say that puts its average under either of the other 3-episode seasons, yeah. Still some good stuff in there.
> "Okay! Job 5-starred and marked 'successful'!" in hopes they'll be inclined to do the same. It's not about accurate information. It's about not losing access to the platform
This reminds me of my experience with Uber and pretty much every 5-star system I have used (which includes Uber and UpWork and not much else).
Also reminds me of the recent Black Mirror season 3 episode 1 "Nosedive" where nearly every personal or professional interaction generates a rating.
But anyway, the basic concept of systems where you are rating someone between 1 and 5 stars seems to not work, because for whatever reason(s) (structural to this type of system) it tends towards giving everyone a 5 unless you are just new and don't understand the 'real' ratings or giving them a 4 when they did a poor job. A 3 is pretty much a vote to remove someone from the system.
Uber drivers have told me (if I remember correctly) that if they get down to something like a 4.6 they get a warning or something and if they can't raise it they may be removed.
I think my problem with it was how plot-driven the last episode ("Hated in the Nation") was. It ended in a way as if it mattered whether the cops catch the bad guy. I love cop shows, but the procedural bits here took time from all the interesting tech concepts that had been brought up. Another reviewer described it as feeling like an episode of X-Files, which I think is an apt way to describe it: Good, but not the kind of good that Black Mirror is uniquely positioned to deliver.
I don't see episode 3 being sub par. It's classic Black Mirror.
Black Mirror tackles one of the hardest problems about technical: How society changes around it.
We spend such a long time talking about the latest cutting edge hardware, new algorithms, new problems that can now be solved, but it's too easy to forget that people are part of this system too.
There's a great film from the 60's [1] that talks about the house of the future. It predicts online shopping and other modern appliances easily, however it is completely blind to any social change. The wife is still a housewife, the husband still goes to work and so on.
As we produce more and more new tech I think media such as Black Mirror are a great way to explore some of the more human implications.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4
For people who like Black Mirror, I highly recommend the YouTube Red series from College Humor, Bad Internet. In the exact same genre, the episodes have nothing to do with each other, so I'll link to my favorite episode, "Amazon Foresight":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQwK3jaQGKY
Black Mirror often takes little details that we add in software, like a rating system, and takes them to their extreme and logical conclusion. Its premises are mostly sci-fi, but as thought experiments on how what we do could lead to a severe dystopia, it is superbly engaging. I recommend watching no more than one episode per day - I've been thinking about its topics quite a lot recently.
At the least, it's refreshing to see updated versions of Huxley/Orwellian dystopias or even departures from them. And to have all of that in condensed 50min netflix episodes, so free for anyone who uses it already, with absolutely no padding to waste your time, is such a unique thing to have. I hope it spawns many more shows following this format, as sort of a counter movement to 24- or Lost-like continuity with tons of baggage.
Yeah, my point was that the episode did a very good job of showing the negative aspects of those things, challenging my views.
A large part of what made Black Mirror so compelling to me is that the stories were so well written I wasn't just reflexively thinking of reasons to write them off. I still don't have a straightforward answer to that episode. Perhaps those types of events are something society will just eventually move past - the shock value will be lost, an individual being forced to do something like that will cease becoming an event, and won't reflect poorly on the institution? I dunno.
> I prefer cynicism over unthoughtful, inconsequential comments
Reminds me of the episode from latest black mirror episode where the truck driver falls from 4.6 rating to 1.8 because she is critical of other people, thoughts.
I really disliked this season. It's too sanitized, not anywhere as visceral or cringe-inducing as the previous ones. Hell the first episode actually had a happy ending instead of a deeply depressing one; the endings in Black Mirror always had that appeal in that they always uneeringly hammered in that there's no escaping, there are no happy endings and it can only get worse.
It just felt too "plasticky", that conclusions about the worlds displayed were being forced on me, instead of giving some room for thought.
Black Mirror - Season 3
How incredibly dystopian of you, China. This is also pretty funny considering it is exactly the premise the first episode of the new Black Mirror season.
I just finished watching the Nosedive (Season 3, episode 1) from Black Mirror on Netflix, it shows a similar system. Unlike other Black Mirror episodes its quite well balanced. I would highly highly recommend watching it.
This reminds me of an episode in the new season of Black Mirror when they connect a guy to a device which data mines his memories and conjures up horrors to entertain the guy...SPOILER ALERT!!...and he dies 0.04s after the connection.
> Startup idea: neural-network-based filter for social media applications to hide any discussion of the results of a particular game until after you watch it. Bonus if it can also hide movie spoilers.
Fuck no. Last thing you want is nation-states hacking that and delivering censorship straight to your mind or "Funny how this ballot has one candidate only".
People could even intentionally inflict this on themselves, such as "blocking" a person after a bad breakup so you can't see them or hear their names when they come up in conversation - I hear there might be a Black Mirror episode that touches on this (I'm yet to watch any of them).
Edit: Apologies for my off-topic rant: I read "neural-network-based filter" as "neural filter". I'll leave my comment as a monument to my derpery.
The more time goes on, the more confident I become in the notion that I am currently living in an episode of Black Mirror.
That's a bingeable show because it hooks you with cliffhangers. I don't consider it a great show by any stretch like I do Black Mirror so binging is fine. I watched 3 or 4 episodes and put it down. I'll finish it at some point.
I personally found "National Anthem" to be the most realistic and plausible episode so far - I mean, it's totally doable today, and I think the show gives an accurate portrayal of how such situation would develop with the modern Internet, and also of how helplessness even a most powerful person can feel when the whole system turns its back on them.
But each episode of Black Mirror is different anyways, so I'd give the rest a try anyway.
This reminds me of the new Black Mirror season 3 pilot
> to me it was just too unbelievable and silly
Uuh... Have you seen our reality?
http://qz.com/506490/the-black-mirror-episode-that-imagined-david-camerons-dalliance-with-a-pig/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3242550/Cameron-pig-bemused-look-face-future-PM-took-outrageous-initiation-ceremony-joining-Oxford-dining-society.html
I am too. I hear people describing it where it sounds like something I'm supposed to like. But I watched all the previous episodes, and they were all stupid. I saw no depth. It was like a shallow version of that genre, which did have some depth in other shows I've seen in the past.
Maybe I'm too out of touch with the culture to realize the meaning. But I think it's probably just shallow, and superficially appeals to people who don't usually think very deeply about related topics. Like Star Trek. A lot of people love that show, but from what I recall, it looked like a shallow soap opera for nerds. I think some people probably like Black Mirror more as a fashion accessory, because the idea of it fits their style better than some others.
But I will watch the new season, and maybe there's new writers and I'll find something interesting.
I liked all of Black Mirror, including The National Anthem, but that episode is uncharacteristic in that it has almost no traces of the "sci-fi"/"dystopian near future" flavor that characterizes almost all of the rest. It's completely a political satire without sci-fi elements.
Every other episode has a stronger component of bleak sci-fi dystopia.
I really appreciate shows that don't encourage binge watching. Now, I enjoy binge watching as much as the next binge watcher, but since Black Mirror has a definitive ending after each episode, it's that much easier for me to turn off my laptop and go do something else - which usually is talking about the episode I just watched...
Episodes definitely take a theme and take it an exaggerated extreme, but that extreme, while unrealistic, I do think shows a 'black mirror' on certain very real dark undercurrents in today's world. So I don't think you are wrong there.
That said, as a 'thematic' show where the episodes are not related, you may end up loving some and hating others. I'd recommend the Christmas special episode (with John Hamm), if you want to give it another shot.
The first ever episode of Black Mirror is actually kind of weak. It gets a lot better from episode two onwards. From just one initial thought, I found Entire History of You to be an utterly fascinating exploration of the implications of immediate recall of any event in your life - how it affects our jobs, relationships and even sex. That Be Right Back explored both mourning, and also the personas we present on social media vs our real selves.
But to each their own, I guess. If you consider it trite then you consider it trite - I'd consider it to be your loss!
It fascinates me - White Bear seems to be the most divisive Black Mirror episode out there. For me it's one of the weakest episodes of the series, but I know others who love it.
Personally, the Entire History of You is the pinnacle of Black Mirror.
I have to say I enjoy "Shut up and Dance" the most out of any Black Mirror episodes. It is utterly breathless in pace and the twist was a kicker.
Have you seen White Bear? It's one of the most terrifying and thought provoking things I've ever seen. Sure you could probably find elements of that episode in other shows/films, but that's probably true of everything.
Honest question: what are you watching that makes Black Mirror trite and obvious by comparison?
I've never really enjoyed Black Mirror, I've always found it too sneering and pessimistic (and I speak as someone who has enjoyed Charlie Brooker's sneering all the way back to his prank call days).
So I sat down to watch this series, and in some ways the first episode confirmed all my biases, hitting all the usual notes about technology we use and like actually being a terrible slippery slope and you should all feel bad about yourselves.
But then I got to the San Junipero episode, which is so magnificent in every way that I immediately forgave everything. Character driven, subtle, sentimental but optimistic. And probably, over Stranger Things, the piece of sci-fi 80s nostalgia that I'll remember most from this year.
If you enjoyed Black Mirror you have to watch Utopia by Channel 4 in the UK. It's remarkable. Don't search for a synopsis online. It's a sci-fi conspiracy thriller like none you'll have ever seen before.
This is an imdb review that echoed my sentiments:
"First of, I made an account at IMDb solely so that I could submit this review.
Utopia is exceptional. It is a masterpiece. It gets 10\10 from me.
I won't explain what Utopia is about because I don't want to give any possible hint of what is to come, so I'll describe it by comparing it to other things.
Buy the DVD or download the show and your life will get.... stranger. Its rather unsettling how Utopia gets under your skin.
There are a few television shows that share some similarity to Utopia.
For example, if you enjoyed Fringe, the X-Files, then you'll be quite at home with Utopia's paranoid wanderings.
So then you cross the weirdness of Fringe and the paranoia of the X-Files with the violence of Kill Bill and the action\suspense of the Jason Bourne series.
Now cross that already bizarre hybrid with a series of scientific TED Talks given by Joesph Mengale, yes, the Nazi who chopped countless pairs of twins to pieces for the greater good.
I'm not sure which is more bizarre. That description or that incredibly, it works.
However Utopia is much, much darker than any of those. It is the darkest TV series I have ever seen. It also as others have said, feels very real.
A note of warning. When I said Utopia was dark, I was not joking. If you suffer from excessive anxiety or you're squeamish, then do not watch Utopia. Because this TV show is nothing like you've ever seen before, it will affect you. You will be thinking about the themes in it long after you've watched it.
The violence in Utopia isn't actually that strong at all, most of it occurs off the screen. But the intense atmosphere of paranoia which accompanies it makes it brutally real.
On the other hand since the governments of the world have apparently taken a leaf out of Utopia's manuscript lately with regard to surveillance, Utopia could well seem prophetic in a few years time. This really is a TV series for 21st century of flying killer robots and universal surveillance.
The Sopranos changed the way I thought about television. I thought television was for lightweights until I watched The Sopranos. It was like thinking books were mostly about erotica and then coming across Shakespeare and entering a world full of subtle complexities on a bunch of levels.
Utopia is nothing like The Sopranos. But the way it'll change how you view television is very similar.
Just one last thing. There is an American show called "Person of Interest" or something like that which has similar themes. Watch this instead.
In a word: this is intense. "
It also has one of the strangest soundtracks you'll ever hear. Listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2f6MfEzhvo
Warning: Do not watch if you are especially prone to paranoia, depression or anxiety.
Black Mirror is really, really, really good. The writing, the cast, it is just incredible.
But it is also incredibly depressing. Maybe depressing is the wrong word. Emotionally exhausting, you might say. Well worth watching once, but I recently could not bring myself to re-watch it because it so dark. And not even dark humor, which I like, just dark. Maybe in the spring, I'll come around...
There is a TV series better than Black Mirror believe it or not. I'll shill for it because it's an amazing work of art.
It's called Utopia, it's a conspiracy thriller from Channel 4, and if it doesn't send chills down your spine and raise your hackles then you aren't alive.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/utopia
I recently discovered Black Mirror.
It's a great and fascinating series. Finally something other then the mind numbing pabulum that is most TV.
I especially loved season 1 / episode 2.
---
The way our brain works, all experience, self consciousness and awareness is intricately linked to physical perception. If we were to go the 'brain in a petri dish' route, we would have to fake all those signals a body would send to the brain. If we just start emulating the brain physiology digitally, that is easier of course.
But I would not call the result of either method a 'human being', but something inherently different.
I agree with all of these but have to add some, because you are missing a lot of the classics.
- Alien (talk about classic Sci-Fi Horror)
- Westworld (watch the movie before the show. Trust me)
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- The Thing (I've only seen the old one)
- Moon
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys
- Gattaca
- Blade Runner
- Dark City
- Akira (anime)
- Primer (my favourite time travel film)
- Interstellar
- Black Mirror
- Psycho-Pass (anime)
And of course everyone needs to watch - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
This was exactly the subject of one of the episodes of Black Mirror, a very interesting short TV serial from the UK specifically about the impact of technology on current and near-term society.
Black Mirror episode in 2013 had the same plot.
Great episode of Black Mirror.
While I think it will be a while until any implants or brain-computer-interface (neural lace seems vaguely promising, though I wouldn't be the first to volunteer), I think we will relatively soon have cameras and electronics small enough to be embedded into glasses/clothing, that can pretty much record the whole day in good quality, without being really noticeable.
Ie. externalised total memory record/replay.
Not to derail the conversation but this whole discussion on "productization" reminded me of the plot line of a Black Mirror episode. When I originally watched it I found it mostly absurd but now in the context of this thread it makes a whole lot of sense.
Here is the episode I am referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_(Black_Mirror)
For a potential solution, see "15 Million Merits", the second episode of Black Mirror. :)
One step closer to a Black Mirror episode :)
I think you need to look up...
To support your 'Chinese games suck because the Chinese market sux because Chinese people suck' argument, you claimed that Chinese people have no idea what's going on outside the country, which is an offensive and baseless statement. If anyone needs to brush up on reasoning, it's you.
With Hollywood being located in the US, I'd be surprised if this wasn't true.
It may surprise you that some of the more intelligent television and film produced does not come from America and finds huge popularity in China. One recent example is Black Mirror[0], a series of seven sketches pregnant with social commentary of the likes rarely found in US film production. China loved it. I note someone is busy making a US version... to follow your reasoning in jest, no doubt because they are dumbing it down for the dumb audience who have no idea what's going on outside of their own country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
Lifelogging reminds me of this episode of Black Mirror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
Now I don't know how much it was based on Gordon Bell's/Vannevar Bush's idea or if it's simply a big coincidence.
Came here to post exactly this, love this show. Can't wait for the new season, there are supposed to be 6 episodes which is awesome considering the other seasons only have 3 each, October can't come soon enough. I think my favorite episode was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bear_(Black_Mirror)
You'd have to make additional assumptions in that scenario to come up with a viable solution other than "Kill all the humans.".
Perhaps there is a category of jobs that hasn't been invented yet or that already exists but under the current economic conditions can't support more than a handful of people. White collar jobs have existed for millennia, too (scribes, accountants, civil servants). However, it was only with the Industrial Revolution demand for those jobs really took off.
Maybe, some day we'll all be some kind of artists or entertainers. On a more sinister note, perhaps we end up like the humans in the Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits", where humans have to cycle on exercise bikes day in and day out to generate power and receive credits in return.
Those are all very hypothetical assumptions, though. In my opinion, not making any additional assumptions a basic income as of now is the by far most realistic - perhaps even the only - way of dealing with such a - quite likely -scenario.
In my experience, the review process effectively just checks to see if you meet the technical requirements (at least 720p, at least 4h video content iirc), I uploaded four hours of a bbc miniseries(black mirror) and still had my course approved, though it was taken down around 6 months later (never published, was doing market research).
Black Mirror was fantastic. I wish there were more episodes.
Oh good USSR style spy on your neighbors is back for corporate monetization.
You know, I watched a few episodes of the English show Black Mirror about how technology is used for vile dystopian hellscapes like this but it got too depressing to watching after about 3 of them.
How long before this is directly tied to your social media by the companies that require access to your accounts?
In a not so distant future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tMXKQdc5ZM&t=9m
Btw. the Black Mirror TV series is awesome.
The "White Christmas" episode of "Black Mirror" touched on the subject of ethics towards AIs. Highly recommended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
That idea is beautifully explored in this episode of Black Mirror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_%28Black_Mirror%29
> I am open to other suggestion for "What do you do with all of those idle hands and minds?", but you don't provide any.
I don't think there's any perfect solution, once automation is truly nailed. People don't want to be told what to do or forced into work, but I also think that they need something to work for otherwise we'll collectively go insane.
Ever watch Black Mirror? If not, go see the episode titled "Fifteen Million Merits". Something along those lines, sadly....
Oooh, interesting.
There's an episode of the TV show Black Mirror called "The Waldo Moment", which features an arrogant animated puppet that's entirely controlled by the motions of the operator's hand and fingers.
I reckon this bit was clearly a reference to the Heinlein short story.
Looks like it could be a Black Mirror episode.
I think the attacker has camouflage that obscures their identity. Also I believe the attacker used her blood to do bypass biometric verification and fully take over her account (draining all her points).
If you liked this video I'd highly recommend two episodes of the British series "Black Mirror." Check out "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Entire History of You."
List of Black Mirror episodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes
That "speech" in that Black Mirror episode for me is up there with the "Network" rant.
> All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful. You couldn't. Yeah? It'd break us. We're too numb for it.
Wonderfully done. Both this and the Domestic Robocop one they did six years ago linked by 'Karunamon. I appreciate the density. Lots of detail to read into.
Two pieces this was reminiscent of and I'd suggest, if you're interested, are:
Black Mirror especially Series 1 Episode 2 "Fifteen Million Merits" and Terry Gilliam's Zero Theorem
Please find a way to get that idea in front of Charlie Brooker. It could make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode.
(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])
0: https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turing_test.pdf
If you have ever watched the TV show Black Mirror, it does an exploration of what it would be like to have instant access to know everything about a person by looking at them. The technology becomes a commodity and results in the destruction of personal relationships rather than a dystopian big brother society.
It seems to me that is a much more likely future than a criminal and government oppression future. Is one of them inevitable? Probably, but not any more than our present is someone else's future.
Tangentially related, but Black Mirror has a great episode which covers a similar premise to your 'contact lens size HoloLens' one.
Basically everything you see is recorded, and you can revisit any moment you've experienced any time you want. Which has many negative effects in the show, but which would actually avoid the author's problem altogether, as you no longer have to 'spend time' to take pictures.
If recording of all of your experiences (good and bad) are implicit, then will it improve our ability to live in the moment? Will it dilute the significance of the moments we want to 'choose' to remember if everything else is bundled in there too?
One of the suggestions of the episode seems to be that allowing ourselves to return to the past to such a degree can make it hard to escape from it and move on with out lives.
This could easily be a Black Mirror episode
This is explored in one of the episodes of the anthology Black Mirror. It's pretty interesting. I don't remember exactly which episode but you should check it out.
Sounds aweful, I'll opt out. Just because some things can be Internet or block chain connected doesn't mean they should be.
Reminds me of the second episode of Black Mirror.
Have you seen "The Entire History of You" episode of Black Mirror?
I would caution against Black Mirror. I felt it was mostly about tabloid style shock value and not about technology. Especially the first episode was just awful - e.g. the pig fucking scene.
I only recently watched Ghost in the Shell for the first time. I have no idea how I missed it all these years. I also had no idea about the follow ons you posted. Excited to watch them now.
On another note, Black Mirror is great but it doesn't even exist in the same realm as Ghost in the Shell. In 1989 we had a much less developed idea of the consequences of future technologies. The ideas presented in the original Ghost in the Shell are basically just rehashed in Black Mirror. I remember how mind blowing I found the Matrix when I first saw it (I would say it's probably the only futurist movie that changed my outlook on the world) however after watching the original Ghost in the Shell I realised that it was just a reinterpretation.
I saw a good talk by someone who worked on the TV series. He mentioned that the writers were big fans of American cop dramas. They wanted to make a cop drama where the cops happen to be cyborgs. Not a sci-fi that happened to feature cops.
Anyway, much agreed. I think GitS:SAC is a much better predictive commentary than Black Mirror (of which I am also a fan). IHMO, it predicted Anonymous much better than I think most techies understand Anonymous today.
In fact, I would argue that Ghost in the Shell's entire franchise remains the most intriguing and exciting science fiction media about networked technology.
If you have never seen the 2-season TV series (and 3 additional films), "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Stand_Alone_Complex), it is by far the best contemporary outlook on near-future internet technology still. Black Mirror is up there, but I think that Ghost in the Shell: SAC presents this cultural criticism in a much stronger (ie., less unhappy) tone.
Maybe they are building something like those in eye projectors that were featured in a couple of episodes of Black Mirror.
I can't decide whether this is a clever satire, a serious proposal, or a pitch for an episode of Black Mirror.
This reminds me to Black Mirror's S01E02 ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/ )
Those hit a bit too close to some of the plot points of the White Christmas episode of the Black Mirror series.
I remember that episode; Black Mirror is a really good, thought-provoking series. As for this particular case, I believe we'll simply adapt. You could weave a pretty much identical dystopia 20 years ago about smartphones of today, but it turns out we're fine, and we're enriched as a society (despite what the anti-technology whiners will tell you).
This comment reminds me super strongly of the Black Mirror episode on humans having memory recording devices turning their every experience into a recorded session to be replayed and analysed at will.
It's very well done and wonderfully dystopic. Soon™
once again, a "Black Mirror" episode got it right. In "15 Million Merits", they pause the ad when you close your eyes or look away and will keep saying in a stern voice to look back at the screen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Black Mirror is a great British TV series which explores exactly that: https://youtu.be/7tMXKQdc5ZM?t=8m44s
Yikes, that's straight out of a Black Mirror episode.
>If you don't want to see ads, you pay a small amount using bitcoins. I don't see it working unless it's forced upon you.
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode. Spoiler: things go very badly if it's forced upon you.
Have you ever watched the show, Black Mirror? That's exactly the subject of one of its episodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzSIQxc_KqE
Also, I think you're thinking too limited...I think if this were perfected, and the physical technology put in place, most people will opt to look like Tom Hanks (or someone else as famous and attractive) than to look like themselves.
Reminds me of that TV show called Black mirror [1]. Such and odd sentence that I think this is life imitating art.
[1] - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/
Theres a rather convincing episode of Black Mirror about this...
I'm a little tired, sorry about the typo, been reading that Atari stuff until daylight and still got up at 9 am. So, yes, Black mirror, and it's definitely worth watching though some of it may not for everybody, especially not if you're easily disturbed.
Black Mirror, episode Fifteen Million Merits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
I think that the clear distinction is:
- In the first case you're gaining access to a content you don't have the right to. Thus braking the law.
- In the second case, you're merely discarding some content that doesn't interest you.
I'm afraid that the kind of argument above will lead us to a dystopia like the one pictured in Black Mirror - Fifteen Million Merits[0].
[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/?ref_=ttep_ep2
Black Mirror has a number of interesting episodes that touch on all kinds of things.
Black Mirror has a pretty interesting episode that touches on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
I've not read that. Personally i felt we're one step closer to the "cookies" in Charlie Brooker's "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror.
From the article :
“Our test participant was impressed with how much M could do, but was sometimes disappointed at how long it took,” UserTesting’s report reads. “He concluded that it would be very useful if he could set it to perform a non-urgent tasks for him while he worked on other things.”
That made me shudder. One person tutting at the poor performance of "it". It seems plausible that robot-powered tasks would complete rapidly, and humans power the slower processes.
So the participant didn't know it was human-powered. If anything, that makes things worse.
This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode where at some point in the future, fat shaming was brought to such an extreme, that everybody's job was just to pedal stationary bikes. And if you slacked, you got fat, and if you got fat, you got fired, and then you had to wear a bright yellow uniform and appear on fat shaming reality tv shows and clean up everybody's trash.
The Black Mirror is an interesting case. It's got 7 episodes over 3 years and is exactly the kind of show Netflix wants so there going to produce another 12.
Honestly, I think really demonstrates a failing of TV and not a success. Like how firefly got 1/2 a season @ 14 episodes.
I've seen the first "season" of black mirror it was OK is just don't like that type of Scifi I like my Scifi more bigger than life, and while i don't mind some "futuristic earth" shows Black Mirror has the same issue I have with most UK shows and that they produce too little episodes to even fill an afternoon, but Black Mirror just took it to a whole new level with having like what 2-3 episodes?
The new season on Netflix will hopefully be at least 10 episode long so I might actually take another spin at it, waiting 10 years for another 3 episodes of Luther or Sherlock is bad enough I'm not going through this again.
With US TV shows I usually wait until at least the mid season or the 9 episode pickup because lately US TV shows especially from the bigger networks have less job security than the offspring of JRR Martin novels and the Walking Dead characters.
So far we had quite a "decent" year, 12 Monkeys has been renewed, Childhoods End and Westworld are coming, the CW actually managed to make comic book shows (never was a huge comic fan, infact i never had a chance to read a single book i think) cool, we are bloody getting The Man in the High Castle show on Amazon and Marvel's Netflix production is in full gear.
Reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror.
I think you are making a weak argument that creating concrete audio/video recordings has any similarity to the memory of one's mind. There is such a massive ocean of difference between the filters of perception and distortion in memory recollection and video recordings, I think you are making the brain out to be something it isn't.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting debate. Reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror. Check that out for sure, it basically illustrates what you are saying. I found the segment in which before boarding an airplane passengers were required to allow the security to review their memory quite disturbing. Extrapolate that invasion of privacy in every other direction. Having whatever cloud or personal drive you record to be potentially hackable or open for evidence in the courts... It's just some dystopian death of privacy territory that I can't ever seeing the public embracing. Then again, maybe they will and if they do I'll be moving myself to whatever state our country is willing to stand up for privacy and ban such devices.
The basis of my position is the historical record that the most important ideas and movements towards advancements in human rights have often started out as illegal, unpopular and challenges to the status quo. The idea that we can stop crime by recording everything is an illusion and will only serve to suppress advancements which defy the current rule of law.
I know I'm not answering your question, but see the Christmas special of TV show Black Mirror [1] for what this might look like. Terrifying in my opinion.
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
It also sounds similar to the black mirror episode "Be Right Back", although that episode provides a somewhat darker perspective.
There's an episode of "Black Mirror" that speaks to your "posthistory" idea and it's not pretty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
Here's What Happened at Cambridge IV:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5d9hHvD-T7gC&lpg=PA264&ots=4iPFt60kwj&dq=What%20Happened%20at%20Cambridge%20IV&pg=PA264#v=onepage&q=What%20Happened%20at%20Cambridge%20IV&f=false
This last story makes the ML images even more disturbing!
Highly recommend these stories. They'd make a great black mirror episode.
Black Mirror is outstanding, but all episodes I've seen have been so _intense_ that it takes a while for me to shake off the feelings of unease.
I've been enjoying Black Mirror but pretty much everything I've seen so far is sufficiently dark and dystopian that I really need to be in the right mood to watch an episode.
This is such a worthwhile read. Insane, considering that the first computer was decades away from being invented, and the personal computer was half a century away.
Here is the full text: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
It's not too long--I'd recommend reading it entirely.
EDIT: For anyone looking for more dystopian socio-tech stories I'd also recommend "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and pretty much all the episodes of Black Mirror.
http://compositionawebb.pbworks.com/f/%5C%27Repent,+Harlequin!%5C%27+Said+the+Ticktockman+by+Harlan+Ellison.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29
Jane McGonigal's book on gamification, Reality is Broken, includes quite a bit of detail about this similarity between work and games. The basic idea is that humans enjoy work if certain conditions are met, and games are designed to meet these conditions. She defines a game as having four elements:
* Goals to be achieved that give the player a sense of purpose. * Rules that limit how the player can achieve said goals. * Feedback on the player's progress towards the goals the proves them to be attainable and motivates the player. * Voluntary participation by players aware of the rules and goals.
And then the further argument is that we can make the world a better place and people happier in general by bringing all of these game-style elements into work and everyday life. It's an interesting read, if a little one-sided.
On the flip side, the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Credits" features a dystopia in which most people spend their entire lives generating electricity by peddling on stationary bicycles to earn credits they can use to outfit a virtual persona. Let's hope that's not the logical conclusion of Farmville!
Agreed.
The author also seems to assume that everyone reads like he does, pausing to think about each word, "walking through another's thoughts." This is something I've given a bit of thought to recently, interestingly triggered by an episode of King of the Hill. I don't read in this manner and never really have.
I read fiction for the story. I want to know what happens next. I don't linger on a sentence trying to decipher the subtext. It was a great struggle for me to learn to read in that manner for English courses, and I never really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile today there are great TV shows with interesting things to say. The Wire, The Sopranos, and Black Mirror all have gotten me thinking, trying to see from another perspective much more easily than any book ever has.
I believe that our brains don't all work the same way. What the author gets out of reading, I get out of TV and movies and cannot get naturally out of books.
I don't see many comments that seem to understand what this is. It's part game, part art project. From the article:
> And soon, from the British art group Blast Theory, an entirely different approach: Karen, a mock life-coach app that develops boundary issues and leaves its users feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
It's almost like a milder, usable version of a Black Mirror episode. The lesson seems to be similar, though. It wants you to think about what you tell your devices and how they use that information.
I've only seen the first season of Black Mirror but I already love the show. I work in tech so some of the "possible futures" are a little scary/humbling. I worry about "Pay $X to skip this ad" becoming common place and similar sensors as were in that episode that detected when the human wasn't paying attention and waited until they opened their eyes or looked back at screen to continue.
I highly recommend that everyone check out Black Mirror, it's less of a TV show and more of a small collection (3 episodes per season) of mini-movies that don't really connect to each other but show possible outcomes of certain ideas taken to the extreme.
There's an episode of the show Black Mirror that makes this very very obvious.
>My sci-fi scale projection/evolution of this concept: because the things we do at work aren't intrinsically unenjoyable to begin with, but the way we think about them has the potential to make them feel that way—slow fusion of games that resemble work and work itself produces games that do work, and the distinction between the two is forgotten, a relic from a cruder era.
There was an episode of Black Mirror that hinted at this.
That would make a good episode of Black Mirror. Titled "The Privacy Freaks", it would show people in a social network observing the lives and making fun of the absurd things privacy concerned people do to stay "out".
You should read "The Circle" by David Eggers. It is basically this.
Can you really get out of it?
I closed my account years ago. Use NoScript, Disconnect, uBlock. But my profile is probably still there. It's been mentioned that they keep profiles of people who don't have an account.
I can imagine they could attach this comment and my online activity in other platforms to that profile. Even tell my friends about them.
That would make a good episode of Black Mirror. Titled "The Privacy Freaks", it would show people in a social network observing the lives and making fun of the absurd things privacy concerned people do to stay "out".
I find it intriguing that the author of this article places "Her" in the "path of least resistance" camp. Specifically, the author states that "Her":
> focuses more on the male protagonist’s inability to connect with other humans than the implications of unleashing such powerful programs on the world
I thought "Her" had an incredible amount of restraint, and the story of the AI itself was told through a human lens. This is actually exactly what I observed in many episodes of Black Mirror: normal people living their daily lives, and an exploration of what happens when human nature is enhanced or challenged by advanced technologies.
Really, when I first watched Black Mirror, "Her" came to mind immediately. "Black Mirror" is perhaps more overtly bleak, but I feel that's a choice of tone rather than a decision to take a somehow more difficult path. "Her" raises a lot of the same questions, even if it doesn't judge quite as harshly.
'15 Million Merits' (S1E2) is my favorite. I see it as an intentionally abstract and allegorical world, more like a cartoon or fairy-tale. Yet even not knowing a realistic origin-story, its major characteristics are recognizable, as reductio ad absurdum extrapolations from our world.
And in our world, aren't there an awful lot of arbitrary demands and limits we just accept, or are supported by thin just-so rationalizations? And why? Simply because it's all we've ever known, and everyone else is accepting them, and all the little rewards and penalties and media-messages from our engineered environment combine to just make us play our role.
I think of this episode as "THX1138 for the American Idol/Candy Crush generation".
Yet it's also separately interesting to wonder: could this be a literally-depicted location, somewhere in our future? A synthetic subsistence environment offered to surplus people? It's not blatantly cruel, and it offers plenty of entertainment and status-competition and food and exercise – even though we recognize it as a very small and manipulative sandbox.
I think it's even possible, as an exercise, to imagine all the Black Mirror episodes as being different parts of the same continuity. 'The National Anthem' (S1E1) and 'The Waldo Moment' (S2E3) are both set any-day-now, with essentially no technology that doesn't already exist. 'White Bear' (S2E2) comes sometime not too far off, with only a smidge of new tech. 'Entire History of You' (S1E3) and 'Be Right Back' (S2E1) arrive a decade or few from now, then 'White Christmas' (S3EX?) another decade or few after that.
And '15 Million Merits' (S1E2) occurs sometime indeterminate... but potentially as early as 'White Bear', as a engagement-optimized, 'compassionate' poor-house or prison or nursing-home for those with no prospects outside. (Compare to the synthetic Dutch 'village' for dementia patients: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-dutch-village-where-everyone-has-dementia/382195/)
One thing I have noticed from reading reviews and comments about the show is that there is little consensus about which episodes are the best. Many people (I being one of them), actually think episode 2, "Fifteen Million Merits" is the series best.
Personally, I love every episode, and I even think the "The Waldo Moment," which is by far the messiest episode, made some important points about the dangers of bad and lazy criticism.
This AV Club review of seasons 1 and 2 (http://www.avclub.com/review/black-mirror-is-a-brilliant-call-for-connection-in-106003), which contains fewer spoilers than the episodic reviews, really captures the goal and the value of the series as a whole (see: its title.)
I'd say some other things but want to refrain from spoiling anything. While I usually hate it when people care too much about spoilers (as you note, a work should still stand up upon re-watch), this show at some points relies on the viewer's lack of knowledge to create a tone/mood/point.
EDIT: Grammar.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, I would highly recommend it. It's basically a modern day Twilight Zone.
As some of the other comments have pointed out, episodes 1 and 2 are good but not great. There's a review on AV Club [1] that address it really well, but the general sense is the producers were not quite sure what tone to strike. They tried to mix shock value with sci-fi, a bit of audience pandering and some humor, and it ended up kind of flat.
Episode 3 is where it really takes off. I won't give spoilers but it hit so hard I later realized I wasn't prepared for it. I watched it twice to see whether or not it still had value outside of the "shock", and even the second time I found that it was a fascinating look at where we might be going.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, Robert Downey Jr. bought the rights to turn episode 3 into a movie. The story will center on a widower who uses the technology to reconstruct a vast conspiracy. [2]
[1] http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/black-mirror-the-national-anthem-105464
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/12/robert-downey-jr-black-mirror
Brilliant show. Black Mirror is a bit cerebral, thus not everyone's cup of tea. The episodes I've seen seem to show one sort of technology that's different from what we have, but reminiscent of something common. By the end of the episode, you find yourself wondering if the harmless tech you use is really so harmless.
"They Live" is a fun movie, and like Marxism, it certainly taps inot the vague, nearly universal "everything is wrong" vibe that affects nearly everyone but especially young adults. Other examples: The Matrix. Philip Dick and Stanislaw Lem (perhaps the most underrated SF author ever) made careers out of this emotion. For a modern incarnation on Netflix, check out Black Mirror, particular "15 Million Merits"[1]. Powerful stuff.
When I step back and look at the world, for all of our terrible mistakes, we (the western capitalist states) really are the good guys, because personally and politically, overwhelmingly, we really do despise the despots, and the racists, and the needless violence and barbarism that rises to power in too many places in the world. More than once we've spilled blood and spent money not to benefit ourselves, but to stop something evil from happening to others. And no, this doesn't excuse the fact that we've spilled even more blood for our own selfish ends, be they resources or the assertion of misguided idealism.
Consumerism, unlike unjust war, is a trickier beast to slay. Why? Because it's good in one important way! Consumption really does drive an economy, which is good for people's bellies, and well-fed people are pretty happy (watch Triumph of the Will[2] and notice how often Riefenstahl shows food and people eating). The urge to consume, and all the messaging that goes into it, are manipulative, but it manipulates us into wealth. (Heaven help us all when even the elite can't ignore the externalities of this approach, particularly WRT climate!) We will soon see if virtual goods can thread this needle.
>Once we’ve put on the glasses, what do we do? Where are the aliens, and how do we start killing them?
As anti-authoritarian as I am, I still can't get behind killing anyone. Maybe it's naive, but I really believe in non-violent (not passive) resistance. Ghandi, MLK, Aung Yung Suu Kyi - they show us the remarkable power of patience, love, and unyielding persistence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8
Do you mean the first episode? I think they can be viewed freely online http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/
Can't say too much without giving spoilers, but the British scifi series Black Mirror touches precisely on this in one of its episodes. It was quite well done.
This sounds like the premise of a Black Mirror episode =)
Gee. Thought this might only happen in a 'Black Mirror' episode.
Reminded me of "The Entire History of You" from Black Mirror[1] tv series (I really don't feel like calling it that way, it's more like a separate movies). I highly recommend it.
I wonder how long it takes before those lower(st) paid jobs for those that are not specialized in anything will be in something like mechanical turk. Especially in this example it's visible that those can sometimes require somewhat local workers, so they may spread outside countries with lowest cost of living.
There is a part of the most recent episode of Black Mirror which deals with this (sort of, at least), totally worth checking out if this is an idea that interests you.
EDIT: In a comment below, the team mentioned this was their inspiration. Life imitate art imitates life. Cool!
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode White Christmas (only blocking ads instead of people).
This episode from black-mirror:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/?ref_=ttep_ep2
You have to pay to skip ads.
I watched Charlie Brooker's new Black Mirror episode 'White Christmas' recently, and it deals with technology not entirely dissimilar to this. Well worth a watch.
I just watched episode two of Black Mirror (on Netflix). It shows an interesting world in which tech has really taken over the human.
If you like Black Mirror, you might also like Charlie Brooker's Wipe, now a yearly summary of news. A bit UK centric but very good. This year's is just out:
UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7ytd/charlie-brookers-2014-wipe
World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EoNsGHZD0
Also, Greg Egan. Much of his stuff is far-out hard SF, but many of the short stories are near-future stuff that could easily be a Black Mirror episode. The 'cookie' in White Christmas is very similar to the 'ndoli jewel' of several of Egan's stories.
> the ultimate conclusion is that those in control just enjoy the exercise of power. (See: the humiliation of Abi Khan)
I think the people selling the 'adult channels' in that episode mainly want money, which they know the masses will provide. It's not so much a criticism of those in power as the whole system, including those who watch all the humiliation (the x-factor show and the rough sex show) and make these things financially viable.
Random other Black Mirror trivia: the guy who rallies against the system and then becomes part of it seems to be Charlie Brooker reflecting on himself. People tuned in to Black Mirror to see a David Cameron clone fuck a pig (yes that was actually the plot) in much the same way they tune in to the humiliation channels in 15 Million Merits.
Black Mirror is awesome. My favorite episode is "15 Million Merits", which reminds me of the John Maynard Keynes discussion about digging holes in the desert and putting jars filled with banknotes for people to dig up, or Paul Krugman's suggestion about makework preparing for an alien invasion (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/coalmines-and-aliens-again/). In the future, is any work (even if not that productive, like riding a bike and accumulating points) better than no work and potential social costs?
My take on the role of excercise bikes in the Fifteen Million Merits episode is that they're more of an abstract representation of what is most likely a meaningless job.
It's possible that the bikes are used to generate electricity, but that would be very inefficient and, also, not a very creative interpretation. Maybe they're part of a fitness experiment - the participants have an exercise regiment that they keep and are being monitored for the effects the excercise has on them. In return, they are provided with lodgings and food. After all, people have been paid for weirder things in modern times. I can think of a few more scenarios where the bikes are a part of some data gathering/social experiment thing.
Overall, I think, Black Mirror has a trait that distinguishes good fiction from bad - it manages in each episode to create a world that is abstract and unfamiliar enough to play by its own rules, but at the same time, allows parrallels to be drawn between the fictional world and our reality.
Phrasing to avoid spoilers for Black Mirror...
I think that the efficiency of technology shown in TV shows and movies shouldn't be assumed to imply something about the world therein, unless it's explicitly called out in the work itself. The writers are much more likely to have gone with something because it sounded cool than because there was a sound technological reason for it. The bit in the matrix where someone refers to someone else as "copper-top" is an example, I think.
The idea of replaying moments of our lives reminds me of a Black Mirror episode from Season 1. "Set in an alternative reality where most people have a 'grain' implanted behind their ear which records everything they do, see or hear. This allows memories to be played back either in front of the person's eyes or on a screen, a process known as a 're-do'." Without giving too much away, the episode explores how new solutions to human-problems create unforeseen issues.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
>go find a DVD of Black Mirror
It also recently made it to Netflix. I've been hearing about it all over among my friends the last few days as they've been watching it there (and watched the first couple of episodes myself.)
I just watched the whole series, and I wanted to go ahead and recommend that everyone watch more than that single episode (although I think it's one of the strongest). It's only 6 episodes total (each season has 3 episodes).
I think this audience would especially like the series:
'Black Mirror is a British television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker that shows the dark side of life and technology. Brooker noted, "each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes time if we're clumsy."'
I strongly advise pg to go find a DVD of Black Mirror a horribly under-rated TV series from the excellent Charlie Brooker - the one on replaying ones memories suggests just reading will be a lot less troublesome !
I do suspect we will be less likely to record our lives for later playback than have them analysed at or near the time for feedback on how to improve. Twitch TV is (I am told) full of streams of top rated people playing WoW and commenting on their actions (so others can learn, or be entertained). It's probable that there are shows now or soon that have players commentating on other players streams, and a fairly short leap from that to commenting on videos of me training my dog, or performing reps or basically anything in the life coach / therapy repertoire.
Audio and visual analysis already allows therapists to zoom in on the important parts of observed patients (certainly in sleep therapy) and will only get better.
Whilst the unexamined life is not worth living, there is no reason you have to be the only examiner. We shall all have our own life long therapists.
If you haven't seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that lets you review and relive your past. It's very much worth watching, and was recently added to Netflix's library:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=3325852
For similarly dark modern stories, check out the two seasons (6 episodes) of Black Mirror, from the BBC. It's a Twilight Zone for the internet generation. (The less you read about each episode before watching, the better.)
> What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of conversations
Along these lines I highly recommend episode 3 of Black Mirror "The Entire History of You". It is essentially a British version of The Twilight Zone.
This reminds me a black mirror episode!
I'm surprised this story got to front page on a SV-based forum where everybody feeds on techno-utopianism.
Unsurprised about the negativity in the comments.
You might not like the movie, but it is quite original and dares touch a lot of subjects most of the film industry can't articulate more than 1 at a time.
I wonder how HN takes Black Mirror.
I rather have the feeling there wasn't much there. All that new dystopian action movies are just the basic and shallow action movies we had with a distopian theme on it. I watched Elysium recently. You could have this without the SciFi part also.
I haven't seen a good dystopian movie in a long time. I was however also not very happy with Zero Theorem but they tried to do something different at least.
My relationship with Hollywood is this: I'm always happy they do something with SciFi. No matter how bad it is. People like SciFi atm and this brings money to ideas which also rises the chances of one really good movie. Then it all was worth it.
Same goes for TV shows. Black Mirror has been mentioned here. What a great show! But it was a great time for SciFi also. Look how many episodes Star Gate got. I couldn't watch it because it was so shallow but many people liked it and it was great for the genre.
I recommend Black Mirror as well, but I would suggest skipping the first episode. Like the twilight zone, each episode is independent so it doesn't matter what order you watch them and the first one is... unpleasant (and in my opinion not as well done as the others).
If you haven't seen "Black Mirror" from Channel 4 yet, watch it. I just found out about this recently from the Hello Internet podcast. Very dystopic/dark satire. There are 2 series of 3 episodes each.
Don't spoil it by reading about it!
I can't quite see why this type of thing is so in favour at the moment. I also find it slightly disquieting (although admittedly that's got a lot to do with episode 2 of Black Mirror - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes ).
It just seems like an unnecessary abstraction of willpower - if one already doesn't have the willpower to (for example) limit one's drinking, what is a cutesy game going to bring to the table? I mean, what's to stop me adding "smoke five cigs" or "drink an extra beer" to the list of habits in this particular example?
Oh well, then that means I have this alter ego having a life of his own. Imagine this, after 40 years of having a Facebook account, my shadow account gets his numbers and shadow personality "woken up" into an AI system ( for the Brits, there's a kick ass episode of "black mirror" that illustrates this), I wonder how different my shadow me would be :) Imagine after the human race ends, some aliens resuscitate "us" by using the principle above from deep buried Facebook archives... How much more bullshit would this artificial human race be made of compared to what there is already :)
The TV series 'Black Mirror' had an episode that reminded me of Her. Black Mirror - Series 2 - Episode 1 - 'Be Right Back' presents a woman in a relationship with an android. Very interesting. http://vimeo.com/61215171 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#Series_2
To give a more specific view on how bad this could evolve, please take a look at Episode 3 of Season 1 of the amazing mini-series "Black Mirror"[1].
That said. I expect computer security and privacy to be taken extremely seriously in the years as we proceed in the internet of things where our lives will be televised. Really, escaping will be virtually impossible, so we need to make sure that some breaches are severely punishable.
Technology is tool, the more powerful the tool the more good or damage can do.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#Series_1
This is the subject of an episode of Black Mirror. It's hardly an exhaustive investigation but it's certainly a good slice of Twilight-Zone-y sci-fi.
> If we had the option of a surrogate memory that could be really transformational.
I'm inclined to believe that I don't want surrogate memory. You might be interested in an episode of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You", that is premised around this.
There is a great episode of Black Mirror (All episodes of Black Mirror are great, but this one is more relevant - Season 1 Episode 3) titled The Entire History of Us, it turns the figurative mirror on a world where people do exactly this...
David Cameron must have recently watched the first episode of Black Mirror.
When the girl in the bath came on screen I remembered I was watching a video of a bunch of people who are addicted to their f'ing iPhones. And then I felt like I was watching an episode of Black Mirror.
Wasn’t this an episode of Black Mirror? In particular this season 2 episode titled “Be right back”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-iZTSC9Ml8
And if you’re not familiar with the series, you really ought to give it a go! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
Sooner or later a competitor technology will come out to lines of Google Glass for contacts; ultimately the 3rd episode of Black Mirror, where you can record 24-hours of your life via your eye contacts.
This seems like a case of the same idea evolving in parallel from first principles.
I think that "Her" was written and mostly filmed in 2012, while the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" aired in Feb 2013.
OT: But if you get a chance, watch [1] Black Mirror. There is 2 seasons of 3 episodes. skip the first episode maybe? but I liked it because that* could happen tomorrow. Where as the other shorts are in a somewhat see-able future.
I feel like Spike Jonze was inspired by a few of the episodes. Her was still an amazing movie.
1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/
What more do you think can be said that the last episode of Black Mirror (fictional character as MP) didn't say?
I don't know if you're familiar with the "Black Mirror" series. They're very hard hitting commentaries on our modern societies. One of the episodes (the first one of the second season) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#Series_2 is about such a situation where a person is "brought back to life" using the "image" they've left on social media sites as well as on private digital archives (personal photos etc.). It's not too far from reality which makes it all the more disturbing. I highly recommend it.
This idea (taken to its extreme) is the premise for a Black Mirror episode: http://vimeo.com/61215171
For anyone who enjoyed this and might like to look at similarly themed pieces (impact of social media / internet communication on relationships) - the following might be of interest:
* Catfish [movie, USA] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/
* Black Mirror [series, UK] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/
Both a little on the bleak/dark side, forewarning!
Yes that one was great!
Robert Downey Jr actually bought the rights to this episode to make a full movie out of it, can't wait to see how it'll turn out :-)
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/12/robert-downey-jr-black-mirror
The first episode of the 2nd season of Black Mirror explores some of these ideas. I highly recommend it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#Series_2
Guardian journalist Charlie Booker is the showrunner of a series called Black Mirror on Channel 4 in Britain where each episode is centered around exploring the potential impact of technology in the near future.
There are some scripts written up for a third series and the NSA revelations would be perfect to explore in a show like that. The problem, as is the general case with this issue, that far too few people are actively engaging it. Black Mirror drew around 1.6m viewers at its highest point, but this was admittedly only in the UK and there was no hot button issue being explored.
There is a relevant Black Mirror episode where the premise is a society where the majority of people have implants that record everything around them (and can then project and playback these moments) - like all Black Mirror episodes it has some interesting insights into how this affects society and people.
I definitely think we should hold some people to these standards (law enforcement, security guards, judges, politicians to name a few) - but for society as a whole? No thanks.
Episode 3 of this tv show is very relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes
Charlie Brooker did an episode of Black Mirror[0] based on the premises that everyone records every waking moment of their life.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
They'll require root access as a condition of travel.
(A variant of this idea appears, as a throwaway peripheral detail, in the excellent s01e03 episode of the TV series 'Black Mirror', 'The Entire History of You'... which according to Wikipedia has been optioned by Robert Downey Jr. as a potential film.)
Black Mirror S01E03: The Entire History of You was a pretty decent episode of a Twilight-Zone-like show about the dark side of having a video recording of your entire life.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
Seconded, all 3 episodes of Black Mirror are excellent stories about an imminent future that I'm not sure we really want to come about (except for the art project ;-).
Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror, Series one episode three, "The Entire History of You" is pretty good television sf version of this kind of thing.
Never managed to finish that book. It also appears extensively in Peter F Hamilton's Commenwealth Saga.
Thoroughly recommend getting hold of the third episode of the British SciFi show Black Mirror.
Amazing idea, now imagine this with Google Glass. It would be just like in the third episode of Black Mirror.
Even I when I got a geekgasm the first time (and second, and third...) I saw Glass, you have to keep in mind that there might be unintended social implications[1] with such a device.
[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/ Black Mirror: The Entire History of You
A UK expert of sorts covered this very well. Watch [0] or read a spoiler full review [1] or google for more reviews
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/episode-guide/series-1/episode-3 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/12/19/review-of-black-mirror-–-‘the-entire-history-of-you’/
Apart from the potential physiological issues, the author briefly touches on the sociological impact this may have. In my mind that will be even more profound.
If you haven't seen it, 'Black Mirror' on TV here in the UK has an excellent episode where nearly everyone (voluntarily) has an implant which records everything they see.
Well worth a watch: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od#3327868
not sure how available this is outside the UK. It's called 'The Entire History of You'
I loved Black Mirror (so happy it's getting a 2nd season!), but most of the issues in that episode are due to the main character's shitty life. The neuroticism about his interview, the issues with his relationship, his wife throwing his poorly chosen words back at him, all those would be possible with regular memory. The removal of the grain and "play it back for us!" reaction to his bad interview seem like unusual cases, although I think only time will be able to tell how social norms will form with the second part.
As much as I enjoyed watching Black Mirror bringing a piece of fiction into this kind of discussion early on is potentially highly problematic [1].
Consider what mentioning The Matrix or Terminator does to a discussion about AI. What Black Mirror's "The Entire History of You" [2] does to lifelogging resembles what those films do artificial intelligence for dramatic purposes. I highly recommend reading Less Wrong's article on this issue [1] for an in-depth discussion of this issue.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/
[2] Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bFCqK81s7Y, plot summary (spoilers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29#Series_1.
> you could have a searchable log of your entire life.
Obligatory sci-fi cautionary tale: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/episode-guide/series-1/episode-3
A circular buffer and explicit save is the furthest I'd want to take it.
Watch the 3rd episode in the first season of "Black Mirror" to see some of the downsides of 24/7 video recording.
I hear what you're saying, and I appreciate that you put the time in to write that out, but honestly I'm hearing this kind of argument from so many quarters ("we never look up!" "we all talk, but we never converse!" etc etc) recently that it's starting to get obnoxious.
Conversation is not dead. People have been moaning about how we're all becoming socially isolated since the publication of the first novel. The art of socialising has been declared dying ever since the first VHS was available to buy and watch at home.
Point is, it's bullshit. People still hang out (in person, not in "hangouts"). Yeah, people have mobile phones, and sometimes when hanging out as part of a group we check them, but it's not like it kills all conversation dead. A group of three people all looking at their phones is the exception, not the rule - it's not like that's what we plan to do when we arrange to spend time together.
As for your lady friend, like you said, that's her habit to break. But you can't assume everyone who hasn't taken a vow not to use a smartphone is the same - I have a smartphone, so do all my friends, and yet we're all somehow able to communicate to one another in person. When I go out and about in town I don't see crowds of people standing around looking at their phones. I see groups of people socialising and talking - if someone is by themselves then their phone can provide some distraction/semblance of "company".
There's also a tendency for us techy types to get caught in our own little bubble - I get my news from HN Reddit and Twitter, so my view on how people use these services is clouded. It's like when a journalist starts using Twitter and writes about how "everybody is obsessed with tweeting, you can only send short messages, therefore the art of meaningful conversation is dead". They don't realise that the "everybody" they're talking about is only those people in their immediate social circle.
I've kind of gone off subject, but my main point is this: Black Mirror isn't a documentary. It's so easy to project your own worst nightmares onto new technology. It doesn't necessarily make them a reality.
Charlie Brooker's latest 'Black Mirror' episode touches on a similar subject in a dramatised fashion and it's quite an interesting/thoughtful watch. UK users can catch it on 4OD, it's called 'Be Right Back'.
Watch this before you consider one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29
Season 1 Episode 3: The Entire History Of You
There was excellent thought experiment/one-off drama on how a product like this could affect employment and relationships in the future. "The Entire History of You" aired on British TV last year [1]. It was written by one of Peep Show's [2] writers, a sitcom that uses solely point of view shots.
If you have access to 4OD (by being in the UK or otherwise) you can watch the episode online [3].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)#3._.22The_Entire_History_of_You.22
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peep_Show_(TV_series)
[3] http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/episode-guide/series-1/episode-3
An updated bleak vision of the future can be found in the 2nd episode of the British series "Black Mirror": in a world where the only currency is a Facebook virtual currency you can use to buy extra items for your avatars, skipping commercial costs money and the omnipresent screens/cameras emitting a screeching sound if you close your eyes during the commercials.
"Black Mirror" is a rare type of near-future sci-fi with a strong societal criticism.
The third episode, "Entire History of You", is also great: what will happen a decade from now where technology like Google Glass is omnipresent?
This reminded me of an interesting episode ("The Entire History of You", s01e03) of the UK's Channel 4 series Black Mirror that touches the subject of recording our lives with a "Google Glass" type of device.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od
Highly recommended if you want to take a fictional look into the subject of public surveillance.
pd: in case the Channel 4 video is not available in your country: http://www.tubeplus.me/player/1968872/Black_Mirror/season_1/episode_3/The_Entire_History_of_You/
I generally recommend watching "black mirror" - a funny 3 episode satirical tv thing which is about this very topic. it's worth people's time
Same as Black Mirror 1-03 "The Entire History of You". Very recommended BTW.
http://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-30348/episodes/1065121884
Charlie Brooker already did this, as a lavishly produced 45 minute one off drama.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
(Episode 3 is the relevant one, though you should watch all of them.)
If you found this interesting, I can recommend the 3rd episode of the British show "Black Mirror".
Black Mirror Episode 3 is worth a look, if your interested in where this could end up going. It deals with ubiquitous interpersonal surveillance.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/episode-guide/series-1/episode-3
This sounds a lot like what was described in the UK miniseries "Black Mirror": in short, record your life.
+1 for black mirror and well anything by Charlie brooker. Definitely worth watching!
Charlie Brooker's "The Entire History of You" from his "Black Mirror" miniseries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29#3._.22The_Entire_History_of_You.22) covers this: people are fitted with "grains" that record their entire lives and can be played back at will.
Season 1 episode 3 of BBC4's 'Black Mirror' anthology series, titled "The Entire History Of You", is also a great look at at the implications of in-eye, always-on recording/playback devices.
Related to this topic, be on the lookout for the episode "The Entire History of You" from "Black Mirror".
Extending this to the representation of current technology in TV and film, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror[1] (particularly the first of the series) has, in my opinion, the most accurate depiction of it I've ever seen.
[1] http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
I ♥ this throwaway line:
The end-game for Zynga’s take-over-the-world vision is the human race slaved to artificial dopamine treadmills.
Continuing that off-topic digression, I highly recommend the recent 'Black Mirror' episode (from the UK's channel 4), "15 Million Merits": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_c_Kf8NtOg&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL1EA093A50CE23E88
The second episode of Charlie Brooker's current Black Mirror series of scifi dramas contains elements of Network, but set in a future dystopia where people sort of live inside an ipad that's stuck running farmville. It's a lot better than I've just made it sound. In fact, it's incredible, and terrifying.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
Also highly recommended.
To be honest the whole thing should be at the top of HN, but I doubt it would get upvoted. Maybe we need a summarising blog post...