What Hollywood Is Missing About A.I. The technology is now popping up onscreen in everything from "The Morning Show" to "St. Denis Medical"--but nothing on air this year could compete with reality. Until recently, the most reliable source of clever thought experiments about ascendant technologies on television was the Netflix series "Black Mirror." The anthology drama débuted in 2011, and its creator, Charlie Brooker, quickly established his interest in the promise and perils of artificial intelligence.

Human beings naturally utilize multiple reasoning modalities to learn and solve logical problems, i.e., different representational formats such as natural language, code, and symbolic logic. In contrast, most existing LLM-based approaches operate with a single reasoning modality during training, typically natural language. Although some methods explored modality selection or augmentation at inference time, the training process remains modality-blind, limiting synergy among modalities. To fill in this gap, we propose Mixture-of-Thought (MoT), a framework that enables LLMs to reason across three complementary modalities: natural language, code, and a newly introduced symbolic modality, truth-table, which systematically enumerates logical cases and partially mitigates key failure modes in natural language reasoning. MoT adopts a two-phase design: (1) self-evolving MoT training, which jointly learns from filtered, self-generated rationales across modalities; and (2) MoT inference, which fully leverages the synergy of three modalities to produce better predictions. Experiments on logical reasoning benchmarks including FOLIO and ProofWriter demonstrate that our MoT framework consistently and significantly outperforms strong LLM baselines with single-modality chain-of-thought approaches, achieving up to +11.7pp average accuracy gain. Further analyses show that our MoT framework benefits both training and inference stages; that it is particularly effective on harder logical reasoning problems; and that different modalities contribute complementary strengths, with truth-table reasoning helping to overcome key bottlenecks in natural language inference.

Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it's Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It's the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he's meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he's caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise. The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker.

Every day, the world seems to be slipping further and further into dystopia, with President Donald Trump placing tariffs on islands inhabited by penguins and the country's head of Medicare and Medicaid touting AI-first healthcare. In case you needed an even higher dose of Orwellian anxiety in your life, though, Black Mirror has finally returned for season 7 with six brand new episodes. In its new season, the anthology series about our, shall we say, complicated relationship with technology takes on AI sentience, subscription pricing models, lost loves, high school grudges, and the privatization of health care. It's also got plenty of action, romance, and a heaping helping of tech-era terror. As with any anthology series, Black Mirror has plenty of hits, and also its share of misses, and season 7 is no exception, which only makes it more perfect for ranking.

Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future. Each new innovation gets an allegory: smartphones as tools for a new age caste system, robot dogs as overzealous human hunters, drones as a murderous swarm, artificial intelligence as new age necromancy, virtual reality and brain chips as seizure-inducing nightmares, to name a few. It is a must-watch, but must we take it so seriously? Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit.

The latest season of Black Mirror feels almost therapeutic as we peer over the cliff of civilizational collapse. Everything is awful, but at least we don't have to worry about renting out access to our brains from skeevy startups, or dealing with the consequences of a PC game's super-intelligent AI. While Black Mirror felt like a horrifying harbinger of an over-teched future when it debuted in 2011, now it's practically an escape from the fresh hell of real world headlines. That's not to say that the show has lost any of the acerbic bite from creator Charlie Brooker. But now Brooker and his writers -- Ms. Marvel showrunner Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges, Ella Road and Bekka Bowling -- more deftly wield their talent for cultural analysis. Not all of the new episodes revolve around nefarious new tech, sometimes the tools themselves are genuinely helpful -- it's humans who are often the real problem.

When Charlie Brooker's Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening. Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix's newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create "an artifact" from the show people could experience as an extension of its story. "The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins," Krankel says.

Corrin says they don't "feel great" about its potential impact on their profession. "Obviously, I think it's scary, but it's also a massive conversation, right? There are aspects of it that are terrifying to me as an artist. I love the creative process. I love that this art is born out of being in a room with people and things coming from the depths of someone's human experience or imagination. And I really don't think we'll lose that, or I hope not. "And I think there are also aspects of AI I probably don't understand, and that could be used as tools for good.

From mimicking children to producing uncanny deepfakes, AI bots are well known for their creepy behaviour. But Meta AI took this to an entirely new level as it shocked members of a New York parenting group by claiming to have a'child who is both gifted and has a disability'. Not only did the AI bizarrely claim to have a child, but it also insisted that its child attends a real and extremely specific school for the gifted and talented. And, to make matters worse, Facebook's algorithm ranked the bizarre AI response as the top comment on the post. However, the parents were less than impressed by Meta's parenting advice, as the original poster asked: 'What in the Black Mirror is this?!' Meta's AI shocked a group of parents as it bizarrely claimed to have a '2e' child, meaning a child that is academically gifted and has at least one disability Meta AI is Meta's AI chatbot, powered by the Llama 2 Large Language Model.

After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror is back. Season six is now on Netflix, along with the whole back catalog--including one Christmas special and an interactive movie. The show, created by Charlie Brooker and producer Annabel Jones, is a modern take on classic anthology series like The Twilight Zone. Through Brooker's dark, playful, and sometimes uplifting lens, the show examines the unintended ways technology impacts our lives. Because it's an anthology series--in which each installment has new subject matter and a slightly different tone--each episode has its fans.