From Mickey 17 and M3gan 2.0 to a musical about the end of the world, this was an eclectic year for science-fiction films. Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey set a high bar for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, ideas-wise, the story of robots in cinema pretty much starts to repeat on an endless loop. This year, The Electric State spun a yarn about a robot rebellion, M3gan 2.0 showed you can't keep a good killerbot down and Companion took the femmebot's point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche. All three toyed with the usual notions around free will and indulged in handwringing about when to treat a machine like a person.

HBO's The Last of Us showed viewers in season one that it would lean heavily on the source video games for major plot points and general direction of the season while expanding on the universe, and season two has followed that to the most extreme end possible. Episode two sees Tommy and Maria lead the town of Jackson Hole against a massive wave of Infected, the likes of which we haven't seen in the show (or video games) yet. This was a complete invention for the show, one that gives the episode Game of Thrones vibes, or calls to mind a battle like the siege of Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's epic in scale, with the overmatched defenders showing their skill and bravery against overwhelming odds; there is loss and pain but the good guys eventually triumph. That mass-scale battle is paired with the most intimate and brutal violence we've seen in the entire series so far, as Joel's actions finally catch up with him.

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to take a god's-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers' minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly.

In May, Sydney Leathers confessed to her tens of thousands of Twitter followers that she was smitten. Where'd she meet the guy? Not on a dating app, or through friends, but in the last place she ever expected to find a real connection: her mentions. "Still can't believe I fell in love with one of my reply guys. Apparently, things had progressed since December, when she last posted about him: "I had sex with someone who started as my reply guy and I hope this doesn't inspire confidence in the rest of you because frankly your replies are not that good," she wrote. Leathers is a writer, adult performer, and startup employee whose name you may recognize from her part in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal--this wasn't exactly her first brush with online flirtation. But it was her first time falling for a reply guy, or someone who was, effectively, a fan. The term "reply guy" emerged on Twitter about five years ago to describe the behavior of a certain subset of people, usually with very few social media followers of their own, who stake out space in the mentions of prominent users. They can be counted on to reply promptly and frequently to the tweets of whomever they've chosen as their object of devotion, and they often seek attention by nitpicking, mansplaining, joke one-upping, and harassing them. Because of this, reply guys--who can also be girls, or people of any gender--are generally understood to be pathetic creatures, without a chance in hell of getting said person to like their replies, much less return their affections. So the revelation that this gambit actually worked for someone is … pretty noteworthy. Reply guy success stories may be happening more than we realize. Abby, a 25-year-old in Brooklyn who runs a meme page on Instagram with several thousand followers, told me that she got frisky with one of her reply guys last year. "I'm not the only person that I know that has hooked up with reply guys," she said. "It's not as uncommon as you might think." Now, Leathers' Twitter feed is a monument to her relationship, by turns adorable and lewd. "This definitely caught me by surprise," she told me. "But it's been the best, happiest relationship I've had." To attain this goal, a reply guy's first challenge is to stand out from the crowd. The meme account Abby is the admin for is about politics, so she likes when a guy can show not just that he's hot, but that they share a political sensibility. "I have to be attracted to them," she said. "And they have to have some sort of compelling thing to say." "I feel like I've never more than mildly acknowledged a reply guy before now," she said. "I generally don't even follow them back." But when her now-boyfriend started responding to her tweets last year after discovering her through a winding path that involved the singer of the band Eve 6, she took notice. "I'd seen him reply to my stuff a few times.

You don't have to pick up a paintbrush to create a museum-worthy painting. Thanks to an AI tool called DALL-E, all you have to do is type in the picture you want to make. Now that it's finally available to the public, we'll explain how to use DALL-E to generate AI art for free. This versatile tool is excellent for novice artists and experts alike. For example, it can help you develop ideas for paintings -- and you can then tweak the images you generate, so they look perfect.

'OK, Dad, this is an incredible essay on the effects of grief and grey morality in a postapocalyptic society," says the eldest child, AKA the millennial. "It's got proper female characters, progressive takes on sexuality and tonnes of rain." "They've made a video game of The Handmaid's Tale?" And both games have the best ending ever." Now she has my interest. Video game endings fascinate me, because my generation started out with arcade games that didn't have them.

In The Last of Us Part II, no one's hands are clean. In The Last of Us Part II, no one's hands are clean. For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. Warning: If you haven't played The Last of Us Part II yet, there are some spoilers ahead.

Note: This article contains major spoilers for "The Last of Us Part II" and 2013′s "The Last of Us." A man is shot in the chest and chokes on his own blood. A pregnant woman falls, fatally stabbed in her neck. They just wanted to reach Santa Barbara. Now they're dead because a woman needed information. The murderer, standing amid their bodies, is not the little girl you remember. Five years after the events of the first game, Ellie is cold, brutal and often merciless. Driven by revenge, the girl we knew from "The Last of Us" has morphed into something more sinister. Her optimism is dimmed, her humor muted -- her pun book, once filled with jokes, has been replaced by a journal. "The Last of Us Part II" chronicles Ellie's descent from innocence to match the darkness of the post-apocalyptic hellscape around her. The death of Joel, her guardian and traveling partner from the first game, has set Ellie's moral compass spinning as she struggles to find purpose.

Walt Disney World recently showed the Associated Press what it takes to put their shows together. It's a shift for a resort that hasn't allowed many peeks behind the curtains of the fantasy it creates. Maybe romantic Disney fairy tales come true after all. Data from the popular global online dating site Plenty of Fish reveals that singles who have expressed an interest in Disney are 3.6 times more likely to leave the app in a relationship compared to singles who more generally list interests in music and movies. That was certainly true for Disney fan Abby Schiller.

For the past 18 months, my teams at Acxiom Research have worked extensively with a specific form of artificial intelligence called natural language processing (NLP). Our most exciting NLP development is called ABBY -- our first artificially intelligent employee. But I'm not just here to talk about ABBY. I'm here to talk about the potential of NLP and how to decide if it's a technology your own company should be exploring. First, the open source technology around NLP is so robust you can easily build "on the shoulders of giants" and create amazingly effective NLP applications right now using just a small, highly-focused team and a platform approach. Second, even with such a large amount of powerful technology at your fingertips, creating a front-end NLP (one that "talks back," which is what most people think of when they think of AI) requires both vision and fortitude. Vision to see the power of the technology and sell it to your internal stakeholders. Fortitude because it will require a significant up-front investment before you see returns from some of the more advanced capabilities you need to develop.