News

Warning: This article contains massive spoilers for "M3GAN 2.0." Continue reading at your own risk.

Much like Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," the titular M3GAN of "M3GAN 2.0" (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis) is not the villain of the new sequel from Blumhouse and Universal. The marketing and much of the story would lead the audience to believe that the villain is Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), the new, advanced military-grade weapon created from code that Kurt (Stephane Garneau-Monten) from the original "M3GAN" illegally sold to defense contractors before M3GAN killed him in an elevator. Indeed, the first "M3GAN" movie was undoubtedly a tale about the hazards of allowing AI to go unchecked and the inherent danger of allowing technology to replace human connection.

"When we made the original, it reflected a time when I was deeply concerned about how technology, especially things like iPads and smartphones, was reshaping parenting,...

Hot Docs, one of the world’s leading documentary festivals, has unveiled its full lineup. The event, which runs online from April 29-May 9, will present 219 films from 66 countries across 12 programs, with 50% of the directors in the program being women.

The opening film will be “A.rtificial I.mmortality,” in which director Ann Shin poses the question: If you could live forever through AI, would you? Facing the reality of death as her father suffers from dementia in his old age, the filmmaker investigates the world of digital cloning through AI. After conversations on the process with leading experts in the field, she digitizes her memories and uploads them into a newly created avatar of herself, preserving her personality and identity in digital form forever. The film features commentary from Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University Hiroshi Ishiguro, artificial intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel, and mindfulness guru Deepak Chopra.

I often wonder what influential film theorist Andre Bazin would make of VR and simulations, especially when this year’s Sundance has virtualized the festival experience in a way that benefits from a longer runway than most cultural events pivoting likewise. It’s only fitting that Rodney Ascher’s mind-bending A Glitch in the Matrix would premiere alongside the festival’s virtual avatar party taking place in a computer-generated “space station” that lets us keep a healthy distance. Ascher’s film, which unfolds through a series of virtual interviews, edges towards and backs away from explaining what it could’t have predicted: a virtual end to American democracy during the final days of the Trump administration. If ever there was any point for an experiment to fail in chaos, we broached it while the movie’s virtual print was virtually wet––as the old expression goes.

Ascher, whose work ranges...

Last year felt not too dissimilar to dystopian sci-fi with the Pentagon officially releasing “unidentified aerial phenomena” footage, reports of sonic booms beneath our oceans, monoliths popping up around the globe, self-propelling space rocks entering our solar system, Trump demanding all US UFO documents be declassified by June, and all against the apocalyptic backdrop of a global pandemic.

Now director Rodney Ascher throws another reality rattling bombshell into the mix with his latest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, by proposing that we all might be living in an artificial simulation. Thank f**k, some might think after all of the above, but instead of rigorously exploring the science behind the simulation theory, Agitm more so focuses on and sensationalises the fantastic philosophies of a few ardent followers.

A Glitch in the Matrix is an incredibly entertaining, unique and energetic study that’s both innovative in design and execution thanks to Ascher’s savvy,...

Rodney Ascher’s movies dwell on absurd theories until they start to make a weird kind of sense. His provocative feature-length debut “Room 237” mashed up a range of wild theories about the meaning of “The Shining” and his terrifying “The Nightmare” finds victims of sleep paralysis musing on whether they’ve had bonafide supernatural encounters. Now comes “A Glitch in the Matrix,” a meandering but imaginative riff on same scary-fun approach to actualizing outrageous ideas — but this one widens the scope.

The so-called “simulation theory” has floated around in various forms for millennia, but became more pronounced after the success “The Matrix” encouraged many viewers to question the reality of their surroundings. Drawing on interviews with 10 experts and internet theorists with an endearing mashup of film clips and trippy 3-D animation, “A Glitch in the Matrix” adapts to the internal logic of its echo chamber until starts to sound...

Science-fiction often informs actual scientific breakthroughs, from the 1984 novel Neuromancer predicting the internet to Star Trek's 3D-printers becoming a reality. According to a recent article published in Scientific American, the 1999 movie The Matrix might have shown a similar prescience in describing humanity living in a computer simulation, which has roughly a 50-50 chance of actually being a reality.

According to the report, astronomer David Kipping used a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom to discuss the simulation argument, which states that our lived reality is merely a computer simulation run by a higher power. Using Bayesian reasoning, Kipping contends that the odds of our world being a computer simulation become greater than 50-50 the day we prove we can ourselves create a virtual reality for lesser beings like video-game characters.

"The day we invent [virtual] technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50-50 that we are real to...

Relax, conspiracy theorists — the creator and showrunner of upcoming Fox A.I. series “neXt” does not believe we are all living in a simulation.

“I don’t think so. I really don’t,” Coto told TheWrap on Tuesday during the Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour. “To me, it cuts against Occam’s razor. I mean, why believe that?”

Occam’s razor, developed in the 1300s by English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, is a problem-solving principle that dumbs down the selection between two possible explanations. The simpler explanation wins out each time.

Also Read: Rob Lowe Says His 'Little Stupid Christmas Elephant Movie' Got More Netflix Viewers Than 'The Irishman'

The simulation argument, developed in the early 2000s by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, basically states that it is more likely than not that our civilization is merely a simulation created by a far more advanced society. It...

A Nasa scientist has come to the conclusion that our reality is an elaborate hologram created by an alien race. Dr. Rich Terrile, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has said that we can all be the creation of a cosmic computer programmer as opposed to a God. The theory is backed by other scientists, but also has its detractors as well. Maybe as the late Bill Hicks said "we're all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves" is true.

In addition to Nasa's Dr. Rich Terrile, Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute shares the same theory. Bostrom has given many lectures of the Simulation Theory where he states that we...