The mobile phone has long ceased being a simple two-way communication device: today's handheld is a mini personal computer, complete with multimedia players, maps, and Web browsers. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) want to push the phone farther. They have developed software that turns a phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person's location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

Their lines are all grammatically correct but occasionally nonsensical, with Ker saying he has to "go to the skull" and Middleditch proclaiming that he's "not a bright light." The script was created by uploading hundreds of sci-fi screenplays into an LSTM recurrent neural network, as you do, and seeing what it returned -- including the surprisingly emotional monologue from Gray that ends the short. A wealth of information on "Sunspring" in general and "Benjamin" (as the A.I. itself is named) in particular is available on Ars. Oscar Sharp directed the film for the Sci-Fi London film festival and does an admirable job of making stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor" seem reasonable in the final product.