Movies Why an Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker Used A.I. to Make His New Documentary Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the aa_Sam_Adams newsletter. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. We encountered an issue signing you up.

From to: TIFF's Films on Power, Creation, and Survival Are a Warning These are WIRED's picks for some of the most urgent and unsettling films from the 50th annual Toronto International Film Festival. Some of the most urgent films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival aren't here to soothe. Together,,, and play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they're award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don't just entertain--they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel's siege of Gaza, and a creation we've set loose, growing beyond our control. That's the one muscle of film--to interrogate rather than facilitate.

Although the Cannes Film Festival is the world's most prestigious movie showcase, its spotlight rarely falls on nonfiction film. Years go by without a single documentary competing for its biggest honor, the Palme d'Or, and there is no separate documentary prize. Juliette Binoche, the president of this year's jury, devoted part of her opening-night remarks to Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day after it was announced that her documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk would be premiering at Cannes. But the film itself was slotted into a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions. The festival did, however, roll out the red carpet for The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki's portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which premiered out of competition on Wednesday evening.

For the first time in 63 years, writers and actors are on strike, grinding Hollywood to a halt with a historic double strike. You've probably recognized some of the celebrities at the picket line. These actors, similar to writers on strike, are demanding increased pay and protections from artificial intelligence. But the vast majority of striking members are far from household names, actors who are all but certain to survive the major economic consequences of both strikes as they drag on for weeks or even months. Instead, they're working-class individuals forced to live "paycheck to paycheck," according to SAG LA's Vice President Michelle Hurd--and they want the world to know a few facts.

In June, Amazon announced it was close to being able to offer for package deliveries by drone for its Prime Air service. That same month, Uber said it plans to test food delivery by aerial drone in crowded cities. And drone delivery company Flytrex already touts the ability to deliver drinks via unmanned vehicle on the golf course. Despite such announcements, drones are not crowding the skies over major cities and population centers just yet. But that may be about to change.

If you're not into fashion, you may not recognize that name, but Karl Lagerfeld is to fashion as Wayne Gretzky is to hockey as Mick Jagger is to rock and roll as Steve Jobs is to consumer tech. He is, according to industry insiders, nothing less than a fashion god. Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1938, he designed his first line of clothing at the tender age of 17. His meteoric rise is legendary among creative directors and today at 83, he still has tremendous influence in the fashion world as creative director at Chanel and Fendi. Lagerfeld proved over decades that he had the creative vision to know what consumers would want next before they even knew themselves. He once said, "I am not a marketing person. I don't ask myself questions.

Artificial intelligence, a field that has tantalized social scientists and high-tech researchers since the dawn of the computer industry, had lost its sex appeal by the start of the last decade. After a speculative boom in the '80s, attempts to encode humanlike intelligence into systems that could categorize concepts and relate them to each other didn't really pan out, and "expert systems" packed with rules derived from human authorities couldn't translate their expertise into areas beyond the subject matter for which they were programmed. Even when Deep Blue, an IBM chess-playing computer that could evaluate some 200 million board positions per second, defeated grand master Gary Kasparov in 1997, the triumph didn't lead to an artificial-intelligence renaissance. Now a new generation of researchers hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new developments, as is the willingness of today's practitioners to trade perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. Researchers are building AI-inspired user interfaces, systems that can perform calculations or suggest passages of text in anticipation of what users will need, and software that tries to mirror people's memories to help them find information amid digital clutter.

Peck and his team asked study participants to wear headbands fitted with two functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) probes that measured activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that plays a critical role in the emotion and reasoning behind decision-making. Each person was given a list of films culled from IMDB's lineup of the 250 best movies and the 100 worst movies and asked to pick the top and bottom three movies. The participants were then shown slides of each selection, while the fNIRS probes measured the person's neural patterns that correlated with preference and opposition. "We try to get an idea of what the patterns in the brain look like for things they like or don't like," said Peck. Preference patterns were then fed into a brain-computer recommendation system -- a series of filters and machine-learning algorithms -- that interpreted those patterns to make recommendations as subjects watched a fresh series of movie slides.

Thanks to increasing levels of computational power and an ocean of available data, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly gaining sway in the world of business. And having seen how these tools have informed better decisions and boosted efficiencies across disciplines such as marketing or finance, it was inevitable businesses would start trying to harness them in the war for talent. "The world is starting to see the usefulness of data and software to help solve really difficult problems," says Alistair Shepherd, co-founder of Saberr, the HR analytics tool that uses algorithms to improve hiring decisions and internal team formation. "It makes sense that they might also be applicable to the way we hire." As a result, many recruiters have been exploring the ways in which algorithms and AI can help them better acquire talented candidates.