Ars Technica Videos shared a short film titled Sunspring directed by Oscar Sharp in collaboration with Ross Goodwin, who built "Benjamin" (previously named "Jetson"), the AI who wrote the screenplay. To make Benjamin, Goodwin (who's credited as "writer of writer") "fueled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts." After 48 hours of shooting and editing, Sunspring was born. While the premise seems very surreal and maybe a bit creepy, the result is really funny and the dedication of the actors to the lines makes the 9-minute film an entertaining, absurdist experience. Thomas Middleditch puking out an eyeball for no reason and then turning around and asking, "Then what?" is the absolute highlight of my day. In addition to the screenplay, Benjamin also wrote the lyrics for the song "Home on the Land," which was gorgeously composed and performed by Tiger and Man.

The Viacom saga continues: National Amusements, the holding company through which Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, is looking for new Viacom board members. This isn't a shocker--speculation of a board shake-up began after George Abrams and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman were removed from National Amusements' board a few weeks ago. On the list of potential board replacements, reports the Wall Street Journal, are former Time Warner exec Kenneth Lerer, ex-Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and former Discovery Communications CEO Judith McHale. Don't mess with Texas (drivers): Former Lyft and Uber drivers in Austin, TX say Uber and Lyft broke federal law when they abruptly stopped operations in the city. Drivers filed a suit in San Francisco (where the companies are based) saying the two ride-sharing services violated a law stating they needed to give sixty days' notice to employees before a'mass layoff'.

The personal data you share with Facebook and other social platforms is a treasure trove of information that can, according to one UK startup, prove whether or not you would be a good tenant. Score Assured wants to take the data you share privately and publicly with social media and sell it to individuals, employers, and landlords. Tenant Assured, the first tool in the company's potential suite of data mining-and-selling resources, will connect with your social accounts and give landlords a report based on your data. The company says it uses machine learning software to predict what your data means--from your personality to "financial stress." It also rates the "risk" you would be as a tenant.

It was an historic week as Hillary Clinton secured enough delegates to be the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major political party for the highest office of the most powerful country on Earth. Meanwhile, we're reviewing another debate about where Seattle's startup ecosystem ranks nationally; new data on urban startup clusters; a 15 million funding round for BitTitan; Bill Gates' poultry program; news of artificial intelligence watching and writing sci-fi films; and a good read on how "Silicon Valley" delivers such an accurate satire of the real Silicon Valley. It doesn't rank as high as NYC, LA, or Boston in the number of startups funded or capital invested. So on a dollars in/dollars [out], Seattle outperforms. The perennial debate about who's No. 2 (always behind Silicon Valley) is tiresome, but look, here I am writing about it. One really good thing to come out of this is Tren Griffin's essay at GeekWire on what it takes for a city to develop a top-tier tech and startup ecosystem.

It's how the information is brought together that matters. Until scientists discover the root of that magic, no Artificial Intelligence will be able to truly create a screenplay of their own. They may be able to multiply the abilities that Sharp and Goodwin have created with Benjamin. They may be able to fine-tune them and expand upon them. But Artificial Intelligence will never be able to do what a living and breathing screenwriter can do.

In the wake of Google's AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays. They created "Jetson" and fueled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts. Building a team including Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO's Silicon Valley, they gave themselves 48 hours to shoot and edit whatever Jetson decided to write. Lyrics by Benjamin (formerly known as Jetson), an LSTM RNN Artificial Intelligence.

Quoting unnamed sources, the news agency says Amazon's music service will be priced like competitors, at 9.99 monthly, and looks to launch in late summer. Amazon currently has Prime Music, a unit of the 99 yearly Prime entertainment offering, but its music selections are way slimmer than rivals. What Amazon has that competitors don't is a hugely popular home speaker, Echo, which is used to control the smart home, answer queries, order products and play online music from Amazon's small selection, and via Spotify. Google is launching a similar speaker product later in the year, Google Home. Spotify is the market leader in subscription music, with 30 million subscribers, to 13 million for Apple Music, which launched in June, 2015.

Playing the world's saddest song on the world's tiniest violin is no longer just a sarcastic dream. Using a tiny-radar based chip, the team at Design I/O built a device that detects the movements of this unsympathetic gesture and transforms them into a violin solo. This innovation is based on Google's Project Soli, which uses invisible radar emanating from a chip to recognize finger movements and broad beam radar to detect movement, velocity and distance. Using a tiny-radar based chip, the team at Design I/O has built a device that detects movements of the unsympathetic gesture and transforms them into a violin solo. This invention is based on Google's Project Soli - a tiny radar chip that detects hand gestures Using a tiny-radar based chip, the team at Design I/O has built a device that detects movements of the unsympathetic gesture and transforms them into a violin solo.

We haven't quite reached Terminator's Judgment Day, but there's no doubt that technological advancement has lead to countless gadgets and computer programs that have taken over jobs that used to belong to humans (I used to be a projectionist, which is all but extinct in the age of digital). Director Oscar Sharp, producers Allison Friedman, Andrew Kortschak, Andrew Swett, and Silicon Valley star Thomas Middledtich teamed up to create the short film Sunspring – a nonsensical piece written by anLSTM recurrent neural network. Along with "technologist collaborator" Ross Goodwin, the team set out to build "Jetson", a machine that could write screenplays. They fed the neural network hundreds of science fiction scripts, from TV and film, and proceeded to shoot and edit Jetson'scrazypants script over the course of 48 hours for the Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge. "The question for us is, Can a computer write a screenplay that will win a competition?", says the filmmaker over the credits.

Metropolis is a silent science fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and Thea von Harbou. Lang and von Harbou, who were married, wrote the screenplay in 1924, and the story was novelized by von Harbou in 1926. It is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film stars Alfred Abel as the leader of the city, Gustav Fröhlich as his son, who tries to mediate between the elite caste and the workers, Brigitte Helm as both the pure-at-heart worker Maria and the debased robot version of her, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist who created the robot. Metropolis was produced in Germany in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA) and released in 1927 during a stable period of the Weimar Republic. The most expensive film of its time, it cost approximately 7 million Reichsmark to make.