There are times when you know exactly what you want to watch. So when you're ready to launch a Stranger Things binge session, you can tell Google to do exactly that. Similar specificity can be performed with Spotify and Google Play Music playlists, albums, or titles in your Google Play Movies & TV catalogue. Sometimes I've found the program will start streaming right away, while other times it'll take you to the product screen and you'll still need to press play. Such is the inconsistency that happens at times when living in the future.

Emily St. John Mandel's best-selling 2014 novel, Station Eleven, wears its wish fulfillment on its sleeve. Most of the planet's population gets killed off by a superflu, leaving the survivors to pick through the remnants while fending off marauders and creepy doomsday cults. The novel focuses on a band of traveling players who cater to the public's renewed appreciation of Shakespeare and Beethoven now that the mass-media trash that once diverted them has been switched off. Scenes of the troupe's adventures alternate with scenes from before the pandemic, all related to the life of an actor, Arthur Leander, who dies on the eve of the outbreak. Once creatively ambitious, Arthur became corrupted by fame and celebrity culture, losing his ability to be genuine even with those he professed to love.

NEW YORK – China's SZ DJI Technology unveiled a small camera drone starting at $499 that can take off and land from the palm of a hand, seeking to appeal to the broader consumer market. The new Spark drone weighs about 300 grams, is equipped with a 1080-pixel video camera and can be controlled with a remote, a mobile device or using hand gestures alone, DJI said at an event in New York on Wednesday. The Shenzhen-based company will start shipping orders in mid-June. DJI is the world's leading maker of drones, but most of the gadgets in its existing lineup cost $1,000 or more and are used for surveying crops or industrial sites and in high-end filmmaking. The 11-year-old company is looking to expand its market to stay ahead as global revenue in the industry is projected to increase from more than $6 billion this year to $11.2 billion by 2020, according to researcher Gartner Inc. As the drone market becomes more mainstream, DJI is facing competition from cheaper rivals, especially in China, that have flooded the market with models from $10 mini toys to sub-$100 camera carriers.

A herd of elephants walks in front of Mount Kilimanjaro in Amboseli National Park. A centuries-old problem that has affected nearly every region on Earth is about to get a high-tech solution. Artificial intelligence company Neurala is using machine learning coupled with cameras and drones to put a stop to the poaching crisis in Africa. Focusing on the rhino population (which, for just black rhinos, has dwindled by 97.6 percent since 1960) and African elephants (35,000 of which were killed last year), the company is enhancing the Lindbergh Foundation's effort to track and predict the paths of both at-risk animals and the poachers who are hunting them. "We believe that Neurala is the first to have AI software that can identify wildlife and poachers," Neurala CEO Massimiliano Versace told the Observer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The idea, how technology, music and science can inspire one another, and to the creation of distinct new sounds. Jeffrey Brown is back to take us to an unusual gathering held just a few days ago in Durham, North Carolina. JEFFREY BROWN: Start with a circuit board, add knobs and dials, solder everything together, and, eventually, if you know what you're doing, you have an instrument that can do this. Moogfest, named after inventor Robert Moog, is a celebration of the art, engineering and technology of synthesizers, machines that create sounds electronically. By night, it's a festival of different genres of music, centered on, as they call them here, synths.

Spotify has made another acquisition of a startup: Paris-based machine-learning firm Niland. "Niland has changed the game for how AI technology can optimise music search and recommendation capabilities and shares Spotify's passion for surfacing the right content to the right user at the right time," announced Spotify in a blog post. "The team from Niland will join our New York office and help Spotify continue innovating and improving our recommendation and personalisation technologies resulting in more music discovery which benefits both fans and artists." This is just the latest acquisition for Spotify as it cherry-picks from the pool of music/tech startups. In March, it bought British firm Sonalytic, which had developed music-identification and TV/radio-monitoring technology.

In space, no one can hear you laugh. Ridley Scott's extraterrestrial adventure "Alien: Covenant" is deadly serious about matters that he takes deadly seriously, and the only things that he derides with any irony--muffled and sardonic though it may be--are the movie's snippets of art greater than his own, by artists greater than himself--starting with Richard Wagner, whose "Entry of the Gods into Valhalla" is heard in the first and last scene. The movie's lack of irony is all the more ironic since its subject is the recklessness of mankind in daring to synthesize humans androidally in order to extend our own control over the universe. The pleasure of classic low-budget science-fiction films--the threadbare apocalypses of the nineteen-fifties--is the fusion of authentic fear with the earnestness inherent in comic-book-like creatures and effects. They were movies that, in their exuberant exaggerations, wore their own absurdity with a fiercely straight face, even as they touched on underlying terrors--largely also focussed on the hubris of recklessly manipulating nature.

DJI on Wednesday unveiled the Spark drone, the smallest model the popular Chinese dronemaker has released to date. A first for DJI, the Spark can be controlled entirely through hand gestures for quick airborne selfies. Piloting it with an accompanying app allows for a broader array of maneuvers, including flight patterns like "Helix," which mimics Hollywood-style action movie helicopter shots. An optional remote control adds further control options and dramatically increases the range. Like other recent DJI drones, the Spark is capable of detecting and avoiding objects in its flight path.

This is probably sarcasm, but the point is to get baselines for algorithms which nowadays have lots of tiny tricks which aren't reported in the paper. I had to go through spragnur's DQN code to get those tricks and it took a LONG time...

The story starts out like a bad joke: Obama, Clinton and Trump walk into a bar, where they applauded a new startup based in Montreal, Canada called Lyrebird. If the scenario seems too bizarre to be real, you're right--it's not. The entire recording was generated by a new AI with the ability to mimic natural conversation, at a rate much faster than any previous speech synthesizer. From there, it adds an extra layer of emotion or special intonation, until it nails a person's voice, tone and accent--may it be Obama, Trump or even you. While Lyrebird still retains a slight but noticeable robotic buzz characteristic of machine-generated speech, add some smartly-placed background noise to cover up the distortion, and the recordings could pass off as genuine to unsuspecting ears.