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.

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.

A simultaneously familiar and slightly terrifying robot dog wanders through the audience of a session at the Sydney edition of South by South West. On stage, the panellists opine about a future increasingly defined by artificial intelligence and automation. "It's going to get much, much more significant," says Ed Santow, the former human rights commissioner and current director of policy and governance at the UTS Human Technology Institute. "And for many people that will be a good thing, [but] for a lot of people it'll be really, really hard." The robot is creepy but its fan is as noisy as a ps4 so it's not sneaking up on anyone.

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!''

Tony Brooker, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer of computer programming and education. He designed and implemented the world's first high-level programming language, at Manchester University, and was later founding professor of computer science at Essex University. In 1947, when Brooker took up his first academic post, as assistant lecturer in engineering mathematics at Imperial College, University of London, computers were in the air. He joined Professor KD Tocher and another student, Sidney Michaelson, in building the Icce (Imperial College Computing Engine, pronounced "icky"). In 1949 Brooker became a research assistant at the Cambridge University mathematical laboratory and took charge of its differential analyser, a prewar analogue computer.

His creation of the "Ashley Too" toy is injected with the personality of Miley Cyrus, designed for fans to feel closer to her. With moving eyes, a dancing body and emotive conversations, the toy leaves us questioning how much personality our AI smart devices should have – or whether or not they should have them at all. As robots become more human in their interactions, humans are of course more likely to form a connection with them. However, this episode is merely Charlie Brooker's prediction as to what the future holds. Whilst AI smart devices such as the Amazon Alexa and Google Home assistant are entering our homes, they're not yet necessarily equipped with the ability to detect emotion or respond to questions in an emotive manner. So, does this mean that AI will be limited in its success by its lack of emotional intelligence (EI)?

Boy oh boy, Super Bowl LIII really lived up its name this year; that was 60 minutes of gridiron pigskin getting played, right? They really moved the chains is all we're saying. U2 never sounded so good! Most Users Still Don't Know How Facebook Advertising Works OK, fine, we admit that we may have zoned out a little bit, It's not our fault; blame our extreme distaste for the Patriots an incredibly uneventful game the Puppy Bowl and a frankly unhealthy number of chicken wings. But one thing we didn't lose focus on was the commercials.