fiction

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

RMC tests running a classic 68k Mac environment through emulation on an accelerated Amiga and compares it to real Mac hardware. It explores whether an Amiga can be the fastest classic Mac.

A panel from the Beneficial AI 2017 conference moderated by Max Tegmark, with Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Kurzweil, Hassabis, Harris, Bostrom, Chalmers and others. They discuss likely outcomes of human-level AGI and what outcomes are desirable.

A 56-minute fake BBC nuclear attack news broadcast originally made by Ben Marking, re-uploaded in full resolution. It is a fictional breaking-news special depicting nuclear war, and the uploader states it is not real.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

The full unedited 2003 ZDF television interview with David Foster Wallace, running about an hour and a half. He talks about literature, boredom, silence, television and what stories do.

The BBC radio play adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, running about two hours. It features professional voice acting, sound effects and music.

A 2004 short film adaptation of Terry Bisson's story "They're Made Out of Meat", in which aliens discuss the astonishing discovery of meat-based intelligent life. It stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey.

The BBC TV version of the Babel Fish passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Ford and Arthur aboard a Vogon ship, narrated over the show's hand-drawn animated Guide entry.

A short film adaptation of Terry Bisson's story 'They're Made Out of Meat', in which alien explorers discuss with disbelief that humans are sentient beings made of meat. It won a grand prize at the 2006 SIFF short film festival.

Neal Stephenson visits Google in 2008 to discuss his novel Anathem as part of the Authors@Google series. He talks about the book's world and takes audience questions.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.

Epic 2014 is a short science-fiction film that imagines the media landscape merging into a personalized, computer-generated news service. It is a fictional history of 'Googlezon' and the decline of traditional newspapers.

A dramatized fictional video of micro drones with facial recognition and swarm AI used as autonomous killer weapons. It is a Slaughterbots-style warning about lethal autonomous weapons.

A short clip from Person of Interest season 2 where Root and John gain full access to The Machine and its resources. It shows the AI guiding people with targeting data.

A clip from The Newsroom season 3 in which characters argue that the climate change debate is over and only a technology to reverse emissions can help.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.

Kurzgesagt animates Andy Weir's short story The Egg, in which a person learns that they are every human who has ever lived. It adds music and narration to the original text.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas. He explains why academic habits fail outside academia and how to write so readers find the work valuable.

Kurt Vonnegut's 2004 Case College lecture, with Spanish subtitles, in which he sketches the shapes of stories on a blackboard. He plots story arcs as good and bad fortune against time.

A short lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut graphs the simple shapes of stories, such as Man in Hole and Boy Gets Girl. He sketches how fortune rises and falls over a narrative.

CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.

An animated short film of Tanya Davis's spoken-word poem 'How To Be Alone', illustrated by Andrea Dorfman. It gently argues that being alone can be embraced and enjoyed.

Science writer Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer to write, edit and research more productively. He shows his plain-text writing workflow and what led him from tools like Scrivener to Emacs.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

A 2017 documentary filmed at the Santa Fe Institute in which novelist Cormac McCarthy talks with SFI's David Krakauer. They discuss isolation, mathematics, character and the nature of the unconscious.

A short film by Max Joseph about his anxiety in bookstores and how to read more books amid constant streaming, social media and news. He looks for ways to rebalance his content diet in favor of reading.

Daniele Procida's PyCon AU 2017 talk presents a system that divides documentation into four kinds, usually drawn as four quadrants. He explains why mixing them makes docs poor and how separating them improves writing.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

David and Ben Crystal introduce the Original Pronunciation production of Shakespeare and show what it reveals about the history of English, including puns and rhymes lost in modern speech.

An Intelligence Squared debate in which Will Self argues for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik for Nineteen Eighty-Four as the better dystopian warning. It includes acted excerpts and is chaired by Jonathan Freedland.

A film-analysis video essay linking Blade Runner 2049's Cells Interlinked sequence to Nabokov's Pale Fire. It examines the poetry and meaning behind the film's references.

Brandon Sanderson's keynote on AI-generated art, arguing that the artistic process and the journey matter more than the finished product. He explains why he rebels against generative AI in creative work.

A short clip of George R.R. Martin asking Stephen King on stage how he writes so fast. King describes setting daily page goals, around six pages a day, and keeping focused hours.

Neil Gaiman tells the Open Rights Group how the internet and piracy affect books and publishing. He describes how free web copies of his books boosted sales.