Science Fiction

David Harbour, best known for playing supernaturally beleaguered small-town cop Jim Hopper, is now on to even stranger things. In the mockumentary Frankenstein's Monster's Monster, Frankenstein, he plays a puffed-up version of himself, investigating the life of his father, David Harbour Junior, after he unearths footage of his dad's televised stage play while killing rats in his mother's attic. What Harbour discovers--the bizarre artifact that is the play Frankenstein's Monster's Monster, Frankenstein and lots more scandal besides--challenges everything he thinks he knows about his father in just about 30 minutes. Stranger Things' Noah Schnapp Has a Crush on Zendaya What Stranger Things' High Viewership Numbers Actually Mean What he finds is also bizarrely funny. In real life, Harbour's dad's name is Ken and he's in real estate.

Transcendence Official Trailer #1 (2014) - Johnny Depp Sci-Fi Movie HD Two leading computer scientists work toward their goal of Technological Singularity, as a radical anti-technology organization fights to prevent them from creating a world where computers can transcend the abilities of the human brain. The Movieclips Trailers channel is your destination for the hottest new trailers the second they drop. Whether it's the latest studio release, an indie horror flick, an evocative documentary, or that new RomCom you've been waiting for, the Movieclips team is here day and night to make sure all the best new movie trailers are here for you the moment they're released. In addition to being the #1 Movie Trailers Channel on YouTube, we deliver amazing and engaging original videos each week. Watch our exclusive Ultimate Trailers, Showdowns, Instant Trailer Reviews, Monthly MashUps, Movie News, and so much more to keep you in the know.

Over the past two decades, the philosopher David Chalmers has established himself as a leading thinker on consciousness. He began his academic career in mathematics but slowly migrated toward cognitive science and philosophy of mind. He eventually landed at Indiana University working under the guidance of Douglas Hofstadter, whose influential book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" had earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Chalmers's dissertation, "Toward a Theory of Consciousness," grew into his first book, "The Conscious Mind" (1996), which helped revive the philosophical conversation on consciousness. Perhaps his best-known contribution to philosophy is "the hard problem of consciousness" -- the problem of explaining subjective experience, the inner movie playing in every human mind, which in Chalmers's words will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained."

I recently had the pleasure of attending the first AI Tech event to take place in the North of England, something that set a powerful and thought provoking precedent or the future. As part of the Leeds Digital Festival, AI Tech North, was sold out and featured a good mixture of students, programmers and small businesses coming together to hear some of the leading experts in their field share their wealth of knowledge. Anthony Cohn, a Professor in Automated Reasoning at the University of Leeds opened up the event with a lively introduction that gave all in attendance a solid overview of the components of AI, breaking things down into five major categories; perception, language/speech recognition, planning, reasoning (inferring new facts from a basis of existing facts and coming sense) and learning. He stressed that "intelligence can be manifested in different ways" and that "the most successful parts of AI is where there has been little human interaction e.g. The point he made that stuck with me the most however was that the biggest threat to AI and its progress for the foreseeable future is that "the public overestimates the capabilities of AI", something which shows clearly the need for better awareness of exactly what AI is, away from the constraints of science fiction and fantasy.

The increasing buzz of artificial intelligence in news and science fiction generally creates an illusion that machines might imitate and surpass human intelligence. However, that is only a type of artificial intelligence called artificial superintelligence. Artificial superintelligence is something that can be seen in sci-fi movies like Interstellar, where TARS assists the astronauts in their space mission along with having human-like conversations. However, there are also other sci-fi fantasies like the one in'Avengers: Age of Ultron,' where the artificial superintelligence-based antagonist decides to wipe out humanity itself. Such scenarios are concerning people and even tech leaders like Bill Gates and Elon Musk who have warned against the expansion of AI.

The definition of sci-fi is notoriously slippery. For some the genre is defined by its authors and landmark novels – starting with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea author Jules Verne, or pushing things even further back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Others argue that it's more about ideas than people. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for example, calls the genre the "literature of cognitive estrangement." But what if crunching the data on thousands of books could give us a more definite answer?

The last few years have seen an uptick in pop culture stories featuring time travel, from the repetitions and revisions of "The Good Place" and "Russian Doll" to developments in "Game of Thrones," "Star Trek: Discovery" and "Avengers: Endgame." Sometimes the MacGuffin by which we get to play with anachronism, but often also rooted in questions of free will and determinism, time travel is a fascinating springboard for fiction: Are there many futures, or just one? Can you change the past without changing the future, or yourself? This column brings together books about time fractured and out of joint, time as an unbroken lineage resisting empire, and time travel glimpsed through the overlapping lenses of psychology, philosophy and physics. Kameron Hurley's THE LIGHT BRIGADE (Saga, $26.99) is based on her 2015 short story of the same name, fleshing out the high-concept skeleton of a story about soldiers who are literally broken into light in order to teleport them to different theaters of war.

In 2016, a machine beat the world's best (human) player at the ancient strategy game Go, which up to then was said to be too intuitive for a computer. AlphaGo's victory was doubly stunning because it taught itself Go by trial and error. Does the fact that computers can now learn mean that artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from science fiction to reality? The story of AlphaGo is told in a specially isolated display, almost like a little temple, at the heart of the Barbican's sprawling survey of the past, present and future of machines that can think for themselves. It's a show that's sorely needed.

Extraterrestrial life, that familiar science-fiction trope, that kitschy fantasy, that CGI nightmare, has become a matter of serious discussion, a'risk factor', a'scenario'. How has ET gone from sci-fi fairytale to a serious scientific endeavour modelled by macroeconomists, funded by fiscal conservatives and discussed by theologians? Because, following a string of remarkable discoveries over the past two decades, the idea of alien life is not as far-fetched as it used to seem. Discovery now seems inevitable and possibly imminent. Extraterrestrial life, that familiar science-fiction trope, that kitschy fantasy, that CGI nightmare, has become a matter of serious discussion, a'risk factor', a'scenario'.

The Hugo Awards are some of the most important prizes in genre fiction, including science fiction and fantasy. Among past winners we see Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman, and most recently, N.K. Jemisin, who made history for winning Best Novel three years in a row for every book in her Broken Earth series. This year, nestled among nominees for novels, short stories, and even individual episodes of The Good Place and Doctor Who, is an unexpected contender for the Best Related Work category: the primarily women-run fan fiction website Archive of Our Own. Archive of Our Own (often known as "AO3" for short) is an online platform for fan works-- creative work based on existing media like novels, books, and video games, produced by fans of the originals. The nearly 5 million works archived there--4,690,000 as of this writing--represent almost 2 million registered users and countless more who visit the site every day, consuming content and leaving comments.