20 Times This Show Perfectly Predicted Our Future Years Before It Happened

Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology series, fiendishly explores the dark side of our modern obsession with technology. Over the years, it has become such a cultural touchstone that many social media users compared life today to be like living through an episode of the show. Most spooky of all, though, is the way that the series has predicted many technologies and real-life events years in advance. Seriously – it’s uncanny. Here are 20 of the most prescient examples.

20. Autonomous Drone Insects

“Hated In The Nation” is set in a near-future world in which climate change has caused the near extinction of bees. The U.K. government has therefore backed the creation of Autonomous Drone Insects to continue pollination. These artificial bees are then hacked and used to murder the recipients of the “#DeathTo” hashtag. Yikes!

While robot bees killing people may sound like a crazy concept on paper, the idea of drone insects has actually been reflected in real life since the episode aired. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan is home to a program creating small robotic drones that are used to dispense pollen. Let’s just hope these ones can’t be hacked.

19. Social media’s effect on mental health

In “Nosedive,” Bryce Dallas Howard played a woman trying to navigate her way through a world in which social media ratings are used as currency. People rated each other on a scale of one to five for each interaction in their lives, and it directly affected how much money they made and where they lived. As the episode progressed, and she received more and more low ratings, her mental health suffered drastically.

In 2018 a survey found that 41 percent of Generation Z members left social media as it made them feel depressed, anxious, or sad. The idea of deriving self-worth from other people’s ratings is also dangerous, as it is, “placing our happiness in a variable that is completely beyond our control,” according to author of When Likes Aren’t Enough, Dr. Tim Bono.