Previously called Somnio, it’s a small, low-budget yet ingenious sci-fi film written and directed by Travis Milloy, who previously wrote the SF-horror mash-up, Pandorum. Technology, dreams, memory and reality form the backbone of Infinity Chamber, a 2016 thriller now available to stream on Netflix UK. It’s as though the possibilities of technology occupy our dreams long before they become a reality. Computers could talk fluent English long before Alexa today, shows like Black Mirror are pondering the outcomes of death by social media or indescribably complex dating apps. But what’s surely significant is how science fiction, whether on the silver screen or in the pages of a book, both anticipated the rise of computers and, in more recent years, started to explore what our changing relationship with machines might look like. Given all the data and search requests we relatively plug into our devices, it’s often said that our phones and computers know us more intimately than we know ourselves. Voice-activated systems like Siri, Cortana and Alexa are all over the place the phones in our pockets are now the modern equivalent of a Swiss army knife – they get us from place to place, help us interact with our friends, or order a mid-week takeaway. The kind of artificial intelligence displayed by HAL hasn’t appeared yet, but computers are now such an intrinsic part of our daily lives that we’re seldom more than a few inches away from one. Fifty years on from 2001’s release, and the film’s depiction of regular flights into space now looks more than a little far off the mark its notion of an intimate relationship between humans and machines, on the other hand, still seems accurate. When astronaut Dave Bowman engaged in his battle of wits with the malfunctioning HAL-9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey, the whole notion of humans interacting with computers on a mundane, conversational level was still in the realm of science fiction.
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