Dennis Hopper was not happy. It was the summer of 1992, a few weeks into shooting Super Mario Bros: The Motion Picture and the atmosphere on set was febrile. Endless rewrites and script splices had scrambled the story and dialogue. Producers, writers and investors were all working at cross purposes with the directors, the British couple Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. On set, there were 300 extras waiting to film the next scene. The lines Hopper was about to deliver had been changed at the last moment, and not for the first time. He was dressed as a humanoid dinosaur, heavily made up in the sweltering North Carolina heat, his hair gelled into a weird row of reptilian spikes. "We're in the bedroom of King Koopa's skyscraper; it's a big set," recalls actor and co-star Richard Edson.

One week a month, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new show coming out that week. This week: The return of Black Mirror has us thinking about TV's other visions of ominous futures. Not long after C-3PO and R2-D2's scene-stealing turns as the Bert and Ernie of the Star Wars universe, wise-cracking artificial intelligence became a standard feature of science-fiction film and television. Short Circuit had El DeBarge-loving military'bot Johnny Five, Knight Rider introduced droll Trans Am KITT, and who can forget Rutger Hauer as that barrel of laughs who saw attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, Roy Batty? But they all paled in comparison to Max Headroom (Matt Frewer), a chattering combination of prosthetics, post-production monkeying, and screen-saver-worthy animations. In the mid-to-late '80s, the glitchy talking head in the Klaus Nomi threads became ubiquitous through sheer versatility: He was a VJ, the face of New Coke, and, for 14 episodes broadcast on ABC between 1987 and 1988, the namesake character of a cyberpunk thriller set in a dystopian future where it's illegal to turn off a TV.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon University's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at this week's Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon University's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at this week's Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at the Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.