Much of “Black Mirror” has come true since it first appeared in 2011, given that you may well be reading this column on your own black mirror, which is your cellphone, desktop, laptop or TV screen hanging off the wall.
Season 6 of British satirist Charlie Brooker’s gobsmacking series about technology is on Netflix now, giving you the usual nudge: should you really be watching this? Do you not have more worthwhile things to do than stare at a black rectangle?
After years of episodes about surveillance, memory implants, killer dog robots, bloody mobs, distrait social media targets, the post-apocalypse, and (deceased) human life replayed in an endless loop for love, Brooker does something scarier. Tap your humour setting to Dark.
Brooker goes into the past, to VCRs and VHS tapes. Remember them? They’re juxtaposed with current obsessions like artificial intelligence and deepfakes.
Technological terror has always lurked but we were too distracted to prepare ourselves, just as we didn’t prep for this decade’s intense heat, fire and flood. Brooker told the BBC recently that AI is like a “third arm” hanging off the body and we don’t know what to do with it yet.
The first episode is “Joan is Awful,” a brilliant title that sums up what black mirrors have done to us: intrude, survey, record, terrorize, and degrade. In the hands of AI, we are all Joan now.
A successful woman named Joan sits down to watch a show on Streamberry a.k.a. Netflix. Just in time for the writers’ strike over streaming, the show rips off her existence, replicating every moment of her day, her cruelties, hypocrisies, and tics. Because she signed over her image, her employer owns her now for all eternity, can flip her over, under and inside out, can rent out her face, her life.
They can scrape you clean. That is the raw heart of AI.
Brooker has a talent for prediction. Remember Sidewalk Labs, a Google-affiliated ultra-tech neighbourhood planned for Toronto’s Port Lands?…
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