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Black Mirror is returning to our screens for a new series in June - get hyped. It has been four years since fans of the dystopian drama were last treated to a taste of the anthology TV series and 12 since it first aired in the UK so safe to say, its return has been long awaited. But since it first graced our screens in 2011, a lot has changed in the world. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Life has often imitated art and Black Mirror now seems less of a dystopia and more of a documentary. Especially in these seven instances where the show was just a bit too on the nose... 1. PM has sex with a pig In season one of the show, a kidnapper demands that the prime minister, Michael Callow, has sex with a pig on live television to secure the safe return of a British royal family member. While this certainly did not happen in real life, it sounded a bit like Piggate - a claim that surfaced in 2015 that, during his university years, former prime minister David Cameron inserted his penis into a dead pig's mouth at a party. 2. People ride bikes for tokens In another season two classic, Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker imagines a world where people ride stationary bikes for a virtual currency used to buy essentials. Today in Paris's station Gare Du Nord, people can ride bikes to generate power to charge their phones while they wait for their trains. 3. AI versions of deceased loved ones In season two episode Be Right Back, a woman brings her dead boyfriend back to life (kind of) by getting an android version of him, which learns his speech patterns by using his social media posts and online communications Last year Amazon revealed an experimental Alexa feature that allows the app to mimic the voices of users' dead relatives. 4. Joke politicians go viral The Waldo Moment sees a satirical computer-animated bear become a politician. Now we could resort to some rubbish satire of our own and say all the politicians we have in the House of Commons are no better than cartoon bears but that would be cheap. What is the case is that joke candidates like Count Binface and other representatives from the Monster Raving Loony Party frequently outperform fringe candidates in by-elections that take place in the UK nowadays. 5. People rate their social interactions In season three, an episode called Nosedive sees people rate all of their social interactions on a five-star scale which then go on to form a person's socioeconomic status. This is quite similar to people rating each other on Uber and swiping across each other on dating apps like Hinge and Bumble if you ask us. Black Mirror | Nosedive Featurette [HD] | Netflix www.youtube.com 6. Tracking health through tablets In Arkangel, a season four episode, Marie implants her three-year-old daughter with an Arkangel system which monitors her health, vision and hearing via a tablet computer. It is not too dissimilar to the rise of Apple Watches and FitBits which people use to obsess over their resting heart rate, sleep score and step count. 7. The rise of dating apps In Hang the DJ, people use an electronic device called "Coach" which chooses their partners and the duration of their relationship. Nowadays there is always a new dating app every other week promising to find people love and happiness in different ways. So it is safe to say Black Mirror really had its finger on the pulse when envisioning a not-too-distant future. We can't wait to see what phenomena the next few episodes will predict. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Robots fitted with AI developed by Google’s DeepMind have figured out how to play football. The miniature humanoid robots, which are about knee height, were able to make tackles, score goals and easily recover from falls when tripped. In order to learn how to play, AI researchers first used DeepMind’s state-of-the-art MuJoCo physics engine to train virtual versions of the robots in decades of match simulations. The simulated robots were rewarded if their movements led to improved performance, such as winning the ball from an opponent or scoring a goal. Once they were sufficiently capable of performing the basic skills, DeepMind researchers then transferred the AI into real-life versions of the bipedal bots, who were able to play one-on-one games of football against each other with no additional training required. “The trained soccer players exhibit robust and dynamic movement skills, such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more,” DeepMind noted in a blog post. “The agents also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. “Although the robots are inherently fragile, minor hardware modifications, together with basic regularisation of the behaviour during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way.” A paper detailing the research, titled ‘Learning agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning’, is currently under peer-review. Previous DeepMind research on football-playing AI has used different team set ups, increasing the number of players in order to teach simulated humanoids how to work as a team. The researchers say the work will not only advance coordination between AI systems, but also offer new pathways towards building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is of an equivalent or superiour level to humans. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity DeepMind boss says human-level AI is just a few years away Apple finally launches two professional apps on the iPad UK-based tech company claims quantum computing ‘breakthrough’