1 week Ago By [email protected] (Hayley Anderson)
WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Black Mirror. Black Mirror is the tech dystopian drama that isn’t afraid to get fans talking on subjects that have, on more than one occasion, have become reality. Season seven made its debut on Thursday, April 10, on Netflix with six new episodes telling stories that revolve around how technology could impact society in perhaps the not-so distant future.
And with creator Charlie Brooker’s anthology series returning for more this week, Netflix subscribers are looking back at when Black Mirror’s plots have seemingly predicted what’s to come. Starring Schitt’s Creek actress Annie Murphy, season six’s Joan Is Awful revolved around a woman who was stunned to see that streaming service Streamberry has turned her day-to-day life into a TV drama. Sky is giving away a free Netflix subscription with its new TV bundles, including the £15 Essential TV plan.
Members can watch live and on-demand TV content without a satellite dish, including hit shows like The Last of Us, Black Mirror and all WWE programming. from £15 ITV Celebrity Big Brother full cast: JoJo Siwa and Jack P. Shepherd enter house The service does this by gathering real-time data from Joan’s devices and uses AI-generated actors, including a virtual version of actress Salma Hayek, to bring the show Joan Is Awful to life.
This particular episode foreshadowed the Hollywood actors’ strike where one of the issues was the concern that studios would use actors’ images without their permission so AI versions of them could be created for background roles. Sky is giving away a free Netflix subscription with its new Sky Stream TV bundles, including the £15 Essential TV plan. This lets members watch live and on-demand TV content without a satellite dish or aerial and includes hit shows like Black Mirror and You.
from £15 Season three’s premiere episode Nosedive starred actress Bryce Dallas Howard as Lacie who’s in a world where everyone rates each other based on their interactions with them. Everyone’s ratings as a societal currency, determining individuals’ social standing and what opportunities they get in life. Similarly, in China there is the Social Credit System (SCS) which is a nationwide scheme brought in by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
The system is an official record so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated regarding their trustworthiness. Those deemed as “blacklisted” reportedly can be subject to restricted travel, bans on certain purchases and even “public shaming”. In the first ever episode of Black Mirror, The National Anthem, the Prime Minister is blackmailed into having sex with a pig on live TV after kidnappers threatened to kill a beloved princess.
“Pig gate” then emerged in 2015 where an unauthorised biography of the former Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that as a student, he had placed a “private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s head as part of a university initiation. Brooker said at the time about the allegations in the biography Call Me Dave was “a complete coincidence, albeit a quite bizarre one.” Black Mirror season one’s second episode 15 Million Merits saw people riding stationary bikes to earn a currency known as “merits”.
There have been similar examples of using stationary bikes in recent years including with the band Coldplay who used technology at their concerts where fans could help generate energy to power their performance with “energy storing stationary bikes”. In addition to this, commuters at Paris’ Gare Du Nord have the option to charge their phones by riding such bikes. Season two’s Be Right Back saw a woman tragically lose her husband and then replace him with an identical robot which has used his social media posts and online communications to replicate his personality.
Three years ago, Amazon was working on an experimental feature on Alexa speakers where the AI assistant could use the voice of the users’ dead relatives. Amazon stated at the time that it wanted to add “human attributes”, commenting: “in these times of the ongoing pandemic. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.
” The following year, Canadian singer Grimes was “talking to herself” on X, formerly Twitter. She was having full on conversations with a realistic bot that resembled herself, developed by Elf. Tech and powered by AI with help from conducting various interviews with her to make it as realistic as possible.
Black Mirror is available to watch on Netflix..
