When Elon Musk introduced Tesla's robotaxi, the Cybercab, earlier this month, he showed a slide during his presentation that probably looked familiar to Blade Runner 2049 fans. It featured the back of a person wearing a trench coat against a desert-like landscape with high-rise buildings in the background. According to The New York Times, Alcon Entertainment accused him of using "AI-created images mirroring scenes from Blade Runner 2049, including one featuring a Ryan Gosling look-alike." It said that it previously denied a request by Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery to use imagery from the film as part of the Cybercab event. The companies were also named as defendants in the lawsuit. Alcon called Tesla's use of AI to create images nearly identical to scenes from the movie an "intentionally malicious gambit."

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has never attempted to hide the science-fiction influences which inspire his companies. But now, Musk's enthusiasm for film has landed him in hot water as the maker of Blade Runner 2049 sues the billionaire tech boss over Tesla's Robotaxi images. During the'We, Robot' event on October 10, Musk showed a stylised image bearing a striking resemblance to one of Ryan Gosling's key scenes from the movie. However, Alcon Entertainment, the film's production company, says it had explicitly refused a request to use stills from the film during the launch of Tesla's self-driving Robotaxi. The company alleges that Tesla used an AI-powered image generator to create fake promotional imagery based on scenes from Blade Runner 2049.

The "financial magnitude of the misappropriation here was substantial," the lawsuit said. "Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk's massively amplified, highly politicised, capricious and arbitrary behaviour, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account," it added. Alcon also accused the event organisers of "false endorsement" by suggesting a connection between the production company and Tesla. Warner Bros, which hosted the robotaxi launch event at one of its movie studios, was also the distributor of Blade Runner 2049 when it was released in 2017. The highly-anticipated sequel to the 1982 cyberpunk classic Blade Runner, starred Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas and Jared Leto, and won two Academy Awards.

Phantom Liberty is CD Projekt RED's masterpiece. Not only is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty graphically easily three generations ahead of the entire industry and redefines how we experience video games with pathtracing, it's also written even more thrillingly and staged even more explosively. Anyone who doesn't enjoy this several times in different play styles has never loved video games. Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion is a reminder of how incredibly explosive gaming has become – and the perfection with which CD Projekt RED manages to involve its actors. When Idris Elba is on a train out of Dogtown, joking with Songbird about how they really need to eat that one famous burrito of his together sometime, and there's such an eerie silence to the flirtation – the nervous looks of the head hacker because she's about to betray him – these are moments that feel like they'd belong in House of Cards or 24.

Annapurna Interactive is developing a game based on the iconic science fiction film Blade Runner. The game's set between the events of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, so you can get some closure as to what Deckard was doing before meeting up with Ryan Gosling in an abandoned casino or whatever. Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth follows a Blade Runner -- the name on their ID is blanked out in the trailer -- as they explore a mysterious location called the "land of the dead." You can't tell much from the trailer, but we see footage of what looks like an early version of the memory-crafting technology seen in Blade Runner 2049. Annapurna says this game is actually canon and it takes place just one year after the events of the original film, which would put it directly in the crosshairs of some big events alluded to in the sequel. It's always good to see more Blade Runner in gaming, especially after the criminally underrated and recently remastered 1997 adventure title.

To put it simply, the moral circle is the people we care about. Our understanding of it is usually based on William Lecky's History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne. William observes that "at one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally […] the dealings of man with the animal world." In other words, each individual's circle grows as that individual grows older. Just as humanity's moral circle expands from age to age.

Deepfakes, an unknown word in the traditional dictionary, has found a morbid meaning in today's world of technology and media. Everyone in today's era of AI revolution has heard of deepfakes and has heard about the worst of it. Be it Obama's public service announcement deepfake or Zuckerberg's'truth' about privacy on Facebook video, deepfake has shown how it can have an impact on misleading the viewers. If people can't tell the difference between a real video and a deepfake one, then it becomes an easy way to manipulate the public. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine that there is a better way to utilise deepfakes, a good way to leverage its technology.

Back in 2002, movie director Steven Spielberg and automaker Lexus worked together to create a vehicle that predicted what cars might be like in the year 2054. That car, the Lexus CS 2054, was "driven" in Minority Report by actor Tom Cruise; driven in quote marks because the car actually drove itself. But while such vehicles weren't expected until the middle of this century, a research project undertaken by Leasing Options, a British vehicle-leasing company, says that Lexus CS 2054-like cars will be on the road by 2027. "Who would have thought that 2027, just eight short years away, could be the year we see the Lexus 2054 from Minority Report become commercially available," the company said in its news release last month. "That's a whole 27 years earlier than Spielberg had predicted, seeing as the film was set in 2054."

Predictive analytics in marketing, as I mentioned in my last post, is here. Already, this all-encompassing disruption in the fundamentals of marketing and sales is changing how marketing specialists and bloggers are talking about their industry. Machines can predict what you want, when you will want it. Pretty intense stuff, right?! Suddenly the larger than life 3D pink hologram woman from Blade Runner 2049 that bends down to talk specifically to you doesn't seem so far fetched, huh? If you've missed the movie, Blade Runner 2049, go see it, it's good, (although I'm still most partial to the 1982 original Blade Runner).

Virtual assistants are increasingly popular and present in our everyday lives: literally with Alexa, Cortana, Holly, and Siri, and fictionally in films Samantha (Her), Joi (Blade Runner 2049) and Marvel's AIs, FRIDAY (Avengers: Infinity War), and Karen (Spider-Man: Homecoming). These names demonstrate the assumption that virtual assistants, from SatNav to Siri, will be voiced by a woman. This reinforces gender stereotypes, expectations, and assumptions about the future of artificial intelligence. Fictional male voices do exist, of course, but today they are simply far less common. HAL-9000 is the most famous male-voiced Hollywood AI – a malevolent sentient computer released into the public imagination 50 years ago in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.