But we're 90% of the way toward demons' telling meek sales assistants to commit dark acts to prevent the apocalypse in 1979!

That's actually the second-to-last season. Season 7 has been out since April.

I do think that at least on the conceptual level there is some more merit to it. People often through around remarks like "just like Black Mirror", so I think it's interesting to dive into it a bit more, and decypher whether those are just vapid remarks or there is some substance behind it.

Especially on some of the more technologically advanced topics the average viewers might not be aware that those technolgies already exist in the early stages.

But yes, the execution is quite lacking (hopefully it's just a start?), with most of the content trying to mostly tick the content boxes rather than being of substance, and there being quite thin justification to the percentages. (What needs to happen for Lock Henry to go beyond 80%? I'd wager apart from that concrete instance happening we are essentially there.)

> Clickbait trash. Is this really the quality of a normal HN post?

Hi, it's 2025. The whole internet has been like this for more than a decade now, and it's getting worse by the year!

I disagree that this is low quality. Blog posts are often a summaries plus opinion. I don’t think HN would ban blogs and I don’t see how this is different. It does not seem like the ‘rate my character’ paradigm you reference.

The thing is though, this story is a metaphor for life we’re living right now. Consider up in Canada the paper mills that were built near water streams, dumping mercury into indigenous people's food.

Many of which corporations exploited and/or mislead chiefs into believing the project would be safe.

Same premise, different package.

I was about to post Metalhead (https://www.howclosetoblackmirror.com/metalhead) but found you got there first. Interestingly I read that the initial draft had the robots being remotely piloted by humans, which would have been much less frightening (and it would have ruined the apocolyptic setting). The only real fantasy element are the super-high density batteries and extremely fast solar charging. The embed-in-the-skin tracker tech doesn't seem realistic, either - but I suppose if you have those batteries it's possible. Each tag appears separately powered, and needs enough power to transmit through walls and over great distance. The AI and robotics are, ironically, the least fantasy of the elements.

The theme of technology continuing without humans was treated in Ray Bradbury's excellent, melancholic, still-relevant tale written in 1950 "There Will Come Soft Rains". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(sh...

Yeah, we should be at like 80% by now.

Yeah that is 100% straight.

There’s already a common type of email spam that says, essentially, “I hacked your computer and watched you jerk off through your webcam, send me bitcoin or I’ll publish it along with your porn history.”

This is basically the premise of that Black Mirror episode, except if the spammer had actually hacked you for real and wasn’t just shotgun-blasting the message to stupid people.

You've missed out on a lot.

I tell friends to skip that first episode if they want to get into the show.

Arguably it’s about both.

Much of the technology is dangerous in the way guns are dangerous.

It may be true that human behavior is what is reflected back to us, but the potential for danger co-emerges with the capability of the technology we’re using.

I don't think it's true, sci-fi rarely tries to be an accurate prediction of the future.

Rather it's talking about the present, by accentuating some trends of the present to make people think about it. Black Mirror in particular is all about that, it's exaggerating some trends from the present to make us aware of them and the potential consequences if pushed too far.

The article is not proof of your claim AFAICS?