Scifi Methods

Justice has a price. The price is freedom. Judge Dredd is no human rights lawyer. In fact, Dredd lives in a world without lawyers, because all the lawyers are dead and now the law is created, interpreted, and enforced by the same people. No elected politicians, no trained and meticulous judges, no carefully reigned-in police officers – just black spandex [...]

The machines are malfunctioning. Images aren't loading correctly, data is being corrupted and some downright shitty pixels are being chucked up on screen. Fortunately though for those who can appreciate Glitch Art, this is not only a beautiful fault, but a manageable process which can be used to create thought-provoking works of high-tech art.

The 2010s are a popular decade in science fiction, and according to Hollywood the next few years are going to be turbulent. Never mind the nuclear holocaust of 1997, or the exciting bureaucracy of the ‘late 20th century’: it’s the latter half of this decade in which the blackened skies of dystopia shall descend. After all, we have...

Like every westerner in their twenties with no imagination, I want to live in Japan. Not just any Japan – I don’t want to spend 60 hour weeks teaching English as a foreign language whilst coked-up business executives try to grope me (even if it is my fantasy). No, I want to live in dark, corrupt cyberpunk Japan.

Can machines think? This is a question asked by the influential British computer scientist Alan Turing (for which the Turing test is named) in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950. More notably he asks the question, “Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?” Since the 1940s, Turing explored some of the first questions about “intelligent machines”, or as commonly called now, artificial intelligence (I’ll use both terms synonymously).

It’s that time of year again: when Jesus descends from the cross, gathers up his reindeer, and forces us to buy games consoles for twice the price they will be in January. We all know we must purchase items in order to appease this angry bearded overlord, but what presents are suitable for a sci-fi nerd with massive head trauma?