I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords |
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Welcome to Decrypted, Digital Trends' daily newsletter guiding you through the latest news in the world of tech, with insights from our senior writers. |
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by Luke Dormehl, Contributor |
Tens of thousands of papers involving A.I. are published each year, but it will take some time before many of them make their potential real-world impact clear. Meanwhile, the top funders of A.I. — the Alphabets, Apples, Facebooks, Baidus, and other unicorns of this world — continue to hone much of their most exciting technology behind closed doors.
In other words, when it comes to artificial intelligence, it's impossible to do a rundown of the year's most important developments in the way that, say, you might list the 10 most listened-to tracks on Spotify. Still, A.I. has undoubtedly played an enormous role in 2020 in all sorts of ways, and after looking back at the past 11 months, we've identified six key developments and emerging themes that stand out from the rest.
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by Simon Cohen, Contributor |
Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins took to Twitter this week to announce that the movie — which is slated to launch in theaters and on HBO Max on Christmas Day — will be presented in 4K resolution, with Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR) and Dolby Atmos surround sound. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be big news. Most of the premier Star Wars and Marvel content on Disney+, for instance, is already available in these formats. But since its launch, HBO Max hasn't released a single title in anything better than full HD resolution, and there haven't been any promises regarding HDR either.
The Wonder Woman sequel will be available in 4K, Dolby Vision, HDR10, and Dolby Atmos on the Apple TV 4K, Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, Amazon Fire TV Cube, Chromecast Ultra, AT&T TV and supported Android TV devices. |
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by Luke Dormehl, Contributor |
Remember those arcade grabbing machines, forever immortalized in Toy Story as the godlike entity known as "The Claw"? Well, a much larger version of that same concept could soon be shot into orbit and used to clean up space junk — the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space debris that orbit the Earth at unimaginable speeds, threatening to cause catastrophic damage to any satellite or spaceship they might collide with.
That, in essence, is the idea behind a new project sponsored by the European Space Agency that will see Swiss startup ClearSpace construct and launch a debris-removal robot (a giant space claw by any other name) called the ClearSpace-1. |
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When the fourth season of Fargo was delayed for several months earlier this year due to the pandemic, I was crestfallen. With Chris Rock set to star as a 1950s-era gangster in a season that was obviously heavily influenced by Miller's Crossing -- one of the best Coen brothers films, as well as an all-time favorite of mine -- I could barely contain my excitement.
It would be fair to say that my high hopes set me up for disappointment, but there's no denying that season 4 of the anthology show based on the works of Joel and Ethan Coen is the weakest so far. While there are many great stand-alone moments -- The Wizard of Oz-inspired ninth episode is a marvel -- the season as a whole feels overstuffed, with far too many narrative threads for them all to come together as a cohesive whole.
The central story of a gangland war between Italian and Black crime syndicates in Kansas City, Missouri, too often plods when it should sprint, letting plot points simmer for far too long before they boil over, or in some cases, just fizzle out. Several other reviewers took issue with all the speechifying -- the monologues come fast and furiously -- but I found them to be well-written and delivered with gusto by a fine cast.
Far more infuriating is the parade of characters who appear to be quirky for quirk's sake. Fargo has always been defined by its offbeat characters, from Frances McDormand's pregnant and plucky police chief in the 1996 film that started it all to Billy Bob Thornton's turn as evil incarnate in the show's first season, which set a high bar none of the subsequent seasons have been able to match.
And while Jesse Buckley's homicidal Florence Nightingale is a high point, other characters miss the mark badly, including Jack Huston's OCD-ravaged police detective, who comes across as a gimmick instead of an actual person, and a pair of female escaped convicts who appear to be based on characters played (much more indelibly) by John Goodman and William Forsythe in Raising Arizona.
Sadly, this nod to Miller's Crossing sorely lacks that film's taut puzzle-box plot. Rock is in fine form in a rare dramatic role and Glynn Turman gives the performance of his life as his right-hand man, the exquisitely named Doctor Senator, but the inability of series creator Noah Hawley and his co-writers to resist jam-packing this season with too many story lines is a real crime. |
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