Real life is scarier than 'Black Mirror' 'Star Trek' episode, says AI researcher

One of the reasons Black Mirror is so thrilling--and terrifying--is that every episode of Netflix's tech-focused riff on The Twilight Zone is built on a situation that feels theoretically possible, if not inevitable. And that's certainly true for the fourth-season premiere, "USS Callister"--a smart Star Trek spoof that finds horror in artificial intelligence, invasive breaches of privacy and male egotism. The episode follows self-obsessed gaming engineer Robert Daly who devises a way to feed his coworkers' DNA into his code, then puts a Star Trek-esque mod on his company's program. Inside his digital starship, he tortures synthetic versions of his colleagues by turning them into hulking sci-fi monsters, banishing them to the outer planets Daly's starship explores and putting them through emotional hell. But the artificially-intelligent avatars are self-aware, eventually banding together to escape their creator's influence--by killing themselves.