March 2020 was an inauspicious time, I think we can agree. This may be why Devs, an eight-part sci-fi series by Alex Garland that debuted as the world went into lockdown, didn't attract as large an audience as it could have – we certainly had other things to worry about. I was, I confess, one of the many people who missed it. There are lots of reasons why I have recently rectified that: Garland was on my mind after watching 28 Years Later, for which he wrote the screenplay, and the cold, dark world of Devs was also the perfect antidote to the heatwave this column was written under. But the main reason is that five strange years have passed since the show aired, and I was intrigued to see how it looked, at half a decade's remove.

A Chinese software engineer has been arrested for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence technology from Google while secretly working for two Chinese companies. Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement. Ding, who was arrested on Wednesday in Newark, California, allegedly transferred confidential information from Google's network to his personal account while secretly affiliated with Chinese-based companies in the AI industry. "The justice department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk," Garland said. "We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them."

I tested three different string lights designed to go on a Christmas tree, and Twinkly's were easily my favorite. They're beautiful and easy to set up, and the black cord blends in nicely into the tree (the cord also comes in green). The app's Gallery tab has tons of premade light combinations to choose from, and you can also make custom effects in the app. It lets you design a light pattern by using an existing pattern, drawing with your fingers, or even uploading a GIF. The arrangement of lights on the tree works best for gradient and stripe-style patterns though--I love how the candy cane stripe effect looks.

Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. FIRST ON FOX: A group of 30 House Republicans is demanding to know what the Department of Justice (DOJ) is doing to combat the emergence of AI-generated child pornography on the internet. "We write to you with grave concern regarding increasing reports of artificial intelligence (AI) being used to generate child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) which are shared across the internet," Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. "While recognizing the benefits of appropriate uses of AI, including medical research, cybersecurity defense, streamlining public transit, and may other applications, we believe action must be taken to prevent individuals from using AI to generate CSAM." Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., leads a letter to the DOJ asking about what it is doing to combat AI-generated sexually exploitative images of children.

It's been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland's Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland's debut. Now there's Gareth Edwards' The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads. At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin's inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian.

After I watched Men, I went to see what others had to say about it, and the first place I went to was a recorded conversion about the film on Diregentleman's channel. Toward the end of the conversation, Henry Galley says Men further diminished Garland's previous two films. Personally, I didn't get that in regards to Annihilation, but Ex Machina, on the other hand, I hadn't seen before. I did not watch Garland's directorial debut in 2014. And my reason is that I have been obsessed with pop culture about robotic A.I. ever since I was a kid from Astro Boy (circa.

Ex Machina is a 2015 science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Alex Garland (in his directorial debut) and stars Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, and Oscar Isaac. The film follows a programmer who is invited by his CEO to administer the Turing test to an intelligent humanoid robot. Made on a budget of $15 million, the film grossed $36 million worldwide. The National Board of Review recognized it as one of the ten best independent films of the year and the 88th Academy Awards honored the film with the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, for artists Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris, Mark Williams Ardington and Sara Bennett. Garland was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, while Vikander's performance earned her Golden Globe Award, BAFTA Award, Empire Award and Saturn Award nominations, plus several film critic award wins, for Best Supporting Actress.

Annihilation deals in bountiful hallucinogenic imagery, but the image from Alex Garland's sci-fi horror that may prove most remarkable to audiences is one that really ought to be mundane: a poster featuring the film's five female leads. Female representation in Hollywood still lags far behind --women made up only 34 percent of speaking characters in top-grossing films last year, while the number of female leads has, in fact, recently fallen--but Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny have the reins of this $55 million Paramount project, while Oscar Isaac, the film's most significant male character, takes the supporting role of imperilled love interest to a take-action female hero. It's an uncommon setup, and not just for a generously budgeted studio picture. But it's less unusual when you narrow the focus to science fiction, where women have recently been taking the lead on-screen. Garland's sophomore effort as writer-director follows his own Ex Machina, plus such sizable productions as Arrival, Gravity, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Cloverfield Paradox, Colossal, Okja, and The Shape of Water, in putting a woman or women at the forefront of a science-fiction narrative.

Something strange is happening in science fiction. Such are the flora and fauna of what's now being called, rather neatly, the New Weird, the genre's version of the grotesque--though it's only "new" in the sense that it's finally rupturing, like miraculous sidewalk weeds, up through the literary cracks. That's thanks, in very large part, to a very small book called Annihilation. When it came out in 2014, the first in a three-part series, many people professed to love it. Perhaps a few of them genuinely did.

The title of Alex Garland's 2015 thoughtful psychological thriller Ex Machina derives its name from the ancient Greek phrase deus ex machina, meaning'god from the machine.' By omitting the deus from the film's title, it's clear Garland wants his audience to question both the roles of God and man. There's the godly referencing and positioning of Oscar Isaacs's secluded genius, Nathan, the creator of Ava, a robot with consciousness played by Alicia Vikander. And Ava's emotional existence itself goes against the idea of the natural in God, since she is a manmade creation. Meanwhile, the natural world of Ex Machina -- the trees that blend Nathan's perfectly rectangular home into the forest -- acts as a direct juxtaposition to the technological imagery that fills the rest of the film.