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.

Back in 2012, Canadian freelance writer Joshua Barbeau tragically lost his fiancée, Jessica, when she succumbed to a rare liver disease. Eight years later and still struggling with his grief, Barbeau came across a curious website called Project December, billed as'the world's most super computer'. Powered by an early version of OpenAI's ChatGPT, for just 5, Project December let him recreate an AI version of Jessica if he typed in details of what she had been like. After typing'Jessica?', the AI version of his deceased girlfriend told him: 'I miss you every single day' and'I am the girl that you are madly in love with.' Speaking on a new BBC documentary'Storyville: Eternal You', Barbeau, now 36, found the eerie tech'uncannily' similar to his loved one. He says: 'It really felt like a gift, like a weight had been lifted that I had been carrying for a long time.'

Ever since Meta debuted its smart glasses back in 2021, concerns have been raised over their ability to film people without their knowledge. Now, two Harvard students have taken the device's privacy-invading capabilities even further – by building a modified version called'I-XRAY'. The creepy system uses AI and facial recognition software to instantly dox people's identities. In an astonishing clip, the students go up to random strangers and quickly identify their name and other personal details – including their home address, work history and even the names of parents. It's reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode, White Christmas, where a hopeless singleton uses an implant to instantly find online information about strangers.

With the most recent season of Black Mirror, you sensed that Charlie Brooker was keen to move away from his reputation as a prophet. Time and time again since his series hit the air, it has managed to correctly predict the future in all sorts of horrible ways. But this season felt like it was deliberately skewing away from reality precisely to avoid this happening again. After all, unless a hapless demon destroys Earth – or unless Britney Spears literally turns into a werewolf – then Brooker is probably in much safer territory. Reader, it has happened already.

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.

The creator of the darkly addictive sci-fi series Black Mirror saw it fitting to ask ChatGPT to conjure up an episode for Season 6 only to find the chatbot'is sh***.' Charlie Brooker, 52, said he typed in'generate Black Mirror episode' and received a story'that sorta mushed' all the other ones together. The first thing Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker did, when everyone was trying ChatGPT for the first time, was to type in'generate Black Mirror episode.' Speaking to Empire, Brooker found there was no real thought behind the AI-generated script, only that it read'plausibly.' Brooker -- who has been writing most episodes of the haunting, Twilight Zone-esque series since its first 2011 season on UK's Channel 4 -- said that his brush with an AI-generated doppelgänger of his own show did teach him to be less robotic himself. The Black Mirror creator's experience with ChatGPT has encouraged him to make bolder creative choices with future seasons of the dystopian anthology series. One upcoming episode'Beyond The Sea,' starring Josh Hartnett (above) takes place in an alternate 1969 ChatGPT was first unleashed in November, sparking excitement and alarm at its ability to generate convincingly human-like essays, poems, form letters and conversational answers to almost any question. 'I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes'Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!''

Netflix's darkly addictive sci-fi series Black Mirror claims to show the'twisted, high-tech' of the near-future, but several technologies featured in the drama-filled episodes can already be found in our lives today. These include killer robot dogs, a social credit rating system and autonomous pizza delivery. In one of the most memorable recent episodes, 'The Entire History of You,' a contact lens featured a built-in camera that allowed humans to re-watch their memories. The concept is less futuristic than you might think, because Google may be already working on a similar device, while a startup is set to unleash a VR application that enables you to relive your experiences in a digital world, and Snapchat has released a device to capture memories. And let us not forget the second episode in the third series, when an augmented reality tester dies in both the natural and digital worlds.

Today artificial intelligence (AI) driven digital technologies are giving us new pathways to always have your loved ones with you, 7x24. Not really, despite the eeriness from Black Mirror episodes, or Carrie Fisher digitally created to carry on as Princess Leia in Star Wars, and Microsoft securing a patent for software that could reincarnate people as a chat bot, opening the door to more uses of AI contemplating how to bring the dead back to life are rapidly accelerating. Are we ready for death resurrections? Is this the right thing for us to be doing? From my research, we don't have all the answers to this complex question yet, but what we have are many innovators, academics, researchers shaping the answer to this question that will enable richer immersive digital learning experiences – and others that bringing grandma back to life – and persisting forever – may feel positively therapeutic to ease a deep grief, or feel like you are immersed in a Stephen King movie.

Today artificial intelligence (AI) driven digital technologies are giving us new pathways to always have your loved ones with you, 7x24. Not really, despite the eeriness from Black Mirror episodes, or Carrie Fisher digitally created to carry on as Princess Leia in Star Wars, and Microsoft securing a patent for software that could reincarnate people as a chat bot, opening the door to more uses of AI contemplating how to bring the dead back to life are rapidly accelerating. Are we ready for death resurrections? Is this the right thing for us to be doing? From my research, we don't have all the answers to this complex question yet, but what we have are many innovators, academics, researchers shaping the answer to this question that will enable richer immersive digital learning experiences – and others that bringing grandma back to life – and persisting forever – may feel positively therapeutic to ease a deep grief, or feel like you are immersed in a Stephen King movie.

A robot takeover is the plot of many science fiction films, but a video shared on Twitter has some believing the idea may not be too farfetched. A user shared a clip from Chinese-based Unitree robotics firm that shows a squadron of four-legged machines moving in unison. The AI-powered, canine-like robot, named, Aliengo, is designed with depth perception, high explosive sport performance and an advanced protection level – among other features. The short video shows dozens of robots crouched down on the floor, but then spring up to a squatting position, lean forward and then return to their original position - all at the same time. However, the video has sparked some funny, and terrifying responses, on Twitter with some likening to a scene from'The Terminator' and'Black Mirror.'