at any time when the collection predicted the longer term | EUROtoday

On know, the precept of most episodes of the sensible collection of anticipation Black Mirrorto find urgently on Netflix if it’s not already accomplished, is to think about what expertise and its poorly managed evolution may cause worse in people. You too are certain, you’ve got already heard somebody exclaimed: “No, but I dream! We are in Black Mirror Or what? As soon as technology seems to lose the pedals in real life.

Does that seem a bit exaggerated? Not so sure: most technologies described in the series actually exist already. Admittedly, not exactly in the same form, used differently, or with much less impressive results. But Black Mirrorit’s really not just science fiction. The proof, by example.

Social networks, data and surveillance

This is undoubtedly the domain where the nightmares of Black Mirror The most closely closer to reality: our use of social networks and personal data that we generate daily. One of the best known episodes in the series, “free fall” (season 3), describes a universe where each aspect of life depends on a rating system: everyone notes everyone, and the overall note that sums up us is taken into account to allow us or ban access to goods, posts, etc.

This principle, pushed here to the absurd, is only the extrapolation of practices already well rooted in our digital life, but on the scale of services, and not of people: we already commonly note restaurants, hotels, deliveries, etc. These notes also have a direct impact on the work and life of traders and employees, even if we sometimes forget it.

Worse still: China has implemented in some of its provinces and for several years a system of “social credit score” which can lead to depriving citizens with too low notes (due to offenses, financial problems …) of certain public services. We can still reassure ourselves somewhat by remembering the reactions of massive rejection in the face of the PEEPLE application (literally “yelp utilized to individuals”) in 2016, quickly qualified by the Guardian of “probably the most hated social community of the 12 months”, and totally forgotten since …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yef_hfqobd8

Surveillance technologies are also in tune: an episode like “Arkangel” (season 4) stages parents who decide to set up an electronic chip for permanently monitoring.

If the technology presented does not properly speak, the tendency to electronic surveillance of children is real, in particular thanks to specialized applications (still it is necessary that the child has a smartphone), or even by the use of AirTags, an Apple brand device designed to fight against the theft of goods, but which can be extended to people (for example, by carrying them in bracelet). Here again, it is only a trend, not a generalized offer, which has also been the subject of strong criticism and which is far from being largely adopted.

Drones and robotics

Another recurring figure in the series and which we often find in our high-tech news: the development of robots and autonomous drones. Difficult not to think above all about the now generalized military use of these mechanisms, but it is not the only one.

In 2016, Charlie Brooker was included in his episode “Virtual hatred” (season 3) of the bee -shaped killers. This time, reality has caught up with fiction, but in a much more peaceful and reassuring context: researchers have indeed developed nano-drills quite comparable to those of the series, intended to play the role of pollinators in replacement of real bees.

Already deployed in the United States and Great Britain, these substitution robots, however, raise criticism: they are first of all (or even very) costly, and many votes rise to recall that it would undoubtedly be better to seek to preserve the existing natural ecosystem rather than developing artificial palliative solutions to its avoidable upheaval …

Just as terrifying, the episode “Metal head” (season 4) uses a fairly classic figure, at least since Terminator : that of the robot responsible for exterminating all forms of human life. The deadly weapons with the episode’s dog aspect necessarily evoke real technological advances, such as those regularly presented to the public (and investors) by the Boston Dynamics company.

These more or less autonomous quadruped robots capable of performing increasingly precise tasks are intended for industry, but also for the army. However, they are still, and for a long time, in the state of prototype, and not of tools marketed. The challenge, especially on the military aspect, is however size: in 2018, the UN proposed a motion prohibiting purely and simply the development of autonomous war weapons. Motion which has been rejected by several countries, including Russia. Smoke, fire, all that …

Artificial intelligences and limits of consciousness

Another recurring figure in the series is that of artificial intelligence or biotechnology that would extend or replace our consciousness. In addition, since the entry into our daily lives of LLM type AI (Chatgpt, Mistral, Copilot and others), the concept has become even more popular. Here again, however, walking is high between what fiction and our reality offers.

In one of the best episodes in the series, “quickly to return” (season 2), Charlie Brooker imagines an artificial intelligence service capable of “reproducing” a deceased from the data he left on the internet, first in the form of a chatbot, then squarely under that of an android. Since then, reality has partially caught fiction. In an article in the magazine Wiredjournalist John Vlahos tells, for example, how he developed a conversational agent capable of imitating a conversation with his father who died from cancer from many hours of autobiographical recordings made before his death.

More recently, and once again in China, companies like Super Brain have undertaken to market IA avatars of deceased relatives, made using data provided by families.

Of course, this offer, already quite gloomy and questionable at first, is expensive for the consumer (around 2,000 euros per “fundamental” avatar), and his result is not necessarily satisfactory for those who are not convinced in advance: it is, for example, to be able to conduct an avatar with the face and voice of the deceased person, but whose spoken text is produced live by a well -human employee. Again, the commercial promise is indeed worthy of Black Mirror… But its concrete realization brings us back to our reality of 2025.

In his last season, released recently on Netflix, Black Mirror speaks again and several times of artificial intelligence and neuroscience, but always by extrapolating unrealistic results from technologies still in the embryonic state. “Hotel Rêverie” shows an AI capable of generating whole audiovisual fictions.

The hypothesis has already been mentioned, in particular concerning algorithms at work in streaming services: in a certain ideal, it was a question of being able to offer the consumer his “movie” (or his series) ideal, who would combine his genre, his tropes, his favorite actors and actresses, all in an “unique” production entirely generated by IA. In the strictest theory and in the very long term, this kind of production is possible … In reality, we have never done that tackles the beginnings.

Ditto for the magnificent “eulogy”, where the character of Paul Giamatti is offered the possibility of exploring in four dimensions of the photographs of his old great love. Admittedly, the current AI can make it possible to “prolong” images that are provided to them, to imagine what is around a photo or a drawing, for example.

But technology as presented in the episode, capable of reproducing a whole memory using a single sensor, so that one has the impression of entering a photograph, simply does not exist. Likewise, the starting point of the “extraordinary individuals” episode, that is to say the scientific capacity to replace areas of the brain with synthetic tissues, can recall the research carried out by companies like the neurralink of Elon Musk, but the results obtained in reality are still light years from those presented in the series.

The essential ethical vision of technological evolution

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The kangaroo of the day

Answer

If there’s something to recollect from these examples which might legitimately be chilly within the again, it’s that Black Mirror Looking good and properly borrows applied sciences that exist in actuality, however most frequently exaggerates concrete achievements. It is a bit like the usually mocked use of surveillance cameras in sure police collection Experts : just a few seconds and a easy zoom is sufficient for the investigator to disclose the killer’s face or his license plate. In actuality, there’s a good probability that it solely will get a pixel porridge. The potential is already there, the concrete realization, probably not.

Of course, reaching potential is usually a matter of time. On the opposite, many prototypes stay prototypes ceaselessly, many excessive -tech modes disappear as quickly as the next style happens (do you bear in mind the metavese?). However, Black Mirror is a collection that might not be extra helpful, as a result of it alerts exactly on the necessity for an moral imaginative and prescient inseparable from the event of expertise. It tells the nightmare that we may very well be our future if current applied sciences develop with out moral management. Nothing is irreversible, all the pieces is credible, and the alert is launched, episode after episode.