5 times Netflix's Black Mirror has predicted the future (2025)

WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Black Mirror.

Black Mirror isn't afraid to address controversial subjects head on that have often eerily mirrored reality with the dystopian drama back for more.

The new season premiered on Netflix on Thursday, April 10, featuring six fresh episodes exploring potential societal impacts of technology in the not-so-distant future.

With Charlie Brooker's anthology series back for more this week, Netflix subscribers are reflecting on instances where Black Mirror's storylines have seemingly foretold real-world events.

AI actors

Season six's Joan Is Awful, starring Schitt's Creek actress Annie Murphy, centred on a woman shocked to discover that streaming service Streamberry has transformed her everyday life into a TV drama.

Streamberry achieves this by collecting real-time data from Joan's devices and employing AI-generated actors, including a virtual version of actress Salma Hayek, to bring the show Joan Is Awful to life.

This episode eerily prefigured the Hollywood actors' strike, where one of the key issues was the fear that studios would use actors' images without their consent to create AI versions of them for background roles.

Nosedive

The premiere episode of season three, Nosedive, featured actress Bryce Dallas Howard as Lacie, living in a world where everyone rates each other based on their interactions.

The concept of everyone's ratings acting as a societal currency, determining individuals' social standing and what opportunities they get in life, is not just fiction.

In a similar vein, China has implemented the Social Credit System (SCS), a nationwide initiative introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China.

This system serves as an official ledger to track and assess the trustworthiness of businesses, individuals, and governmental bodies.

Those who find themselves "blacklisted" can face severe consequences, including travel restrictions, purchase bans, and even "public shaming".

MP and the pig

Black Mirror's inaugural episode, The National Anthem, saw the Prime Minister coerced into performing a sexual act with a pig on live television to save a kidnapped princess.

Then came the real-life "Pig gate" scandal in 2015, when an unauthorised biography of former Prime Minister David Cameron alleged that he engaged in an inappropriate act with a dead pig's head during his university days.

At the time, Brooker remarked on the similarity between the Black Mirror plot and the allegations in the biography Call Me Dave, calling it "a complete coincidence, albeit a quite bizarre one."

Cycling as currency

The second episode of Black Mirror season one, titled 15 Million Merits, features characters pedalling stationary bikes to earn a form of currency known as "merits".

Recent years have seen innovative uses of stationary bikes, like the band Coldplay harnessing concertgoers' pedalling power via "energy storing stationary bikes" to electrify their performances.

Likewise, travellers at Paris' Gare Du Nord can now charge their phones by hopping on similar bikes.

'Human' interactions with robots and AI

The second season episode Be Right Back, on the other hand, depicts a widow replacing her deceased husband with a robot, programmed with his digital footprint to emulate his personality—a scenario not too far removed from reality.

Three years back, Amazon revealed a feature in the works for Alexa to imitate the voices of deceased loved ones, seeking to capture "human attributes" and provide solace amid the ongoing pandemic: "While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last."

More recently, Canadian artist Grimes was spotted having eerily realistic exchanges on X, once known as Twitter, with an AI bot mirroring her own image and speech, created by Elf. Tech using extensive interviews to enhance its authenticity.

Black Mirror is available to watch on Netflix.