Black Mirror star Cristin Milioti hates how much time technology is taking away from her. But like a lot of us, she still feels beholden to it.

“I hate it. It makes me sad. I hate how much time my phone steals from me,” she told Blavity/Shadow and Act Managing Editor Trey Mangum. “You know, I hate that I can tell even when I open it that I’m like addicted to it and I hate that.”

Cristin Milioti talks ‘Black Mirror’ Season 7 finale and virtual overload

Milioti stars in the final episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror Season 7, “USS Callister: Into Infinity.” The episode is the first sequel in the Black Mirror universe and follows Captain Nanette Cole (Milioti), the new captain of the USS Callister. She and her crew must fight for their lives against 30 million players in an infinite virtual universe.

A lot of areas of our tech-driven lives are similarly packed with millions of users. And while Milioti does use social media, she wishes it didn’t make people so dependent on it.

“So much exists in this virtual world, like Instagram, which is just run by someone who I think should probably be in jail. It all feels so dystopian and so terrifying,” she continued. “And I also can understand the ways in which it’s really helped. They just aren’t as loud to me as the ways in which it just feels like it rots us. We’re so dependent on it, and it just bums me out and it terrifies me.”

Milioti also reflected on Hollywood’s long history of films warning us about tech gone wrong—and how little tech leaders seem to have learned from them.

“We’ve made so many movies about [how] we can’t handle AI. During the writers’ and actors’ strikes, they showed The Matrix at the Metrograph [movie theater in New York]. And I hadn’t seen it on the big screen since it came out. And watching a perfect film about AI during that time, specifically when that’s what we were striking against…I was like, ‘Wow, we’ve been warning ourselves about this the entire time and we just can’t get it together.'”

Watch the full interviews with Black Mirror cast members above Black Mirror is now streaming on Netflix.

Cristin Milioti

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