In August 2001, I was a telecoms analyst visiting investors in Tokyo. In one of these meetings, a portfolio manager at a Very Large Fund asked me what would happen now that GPRS meant that all mobile voice calls would be packet-switched and that therefore mobile operators' voice revenue would disappear within the next 18 months or so. This was a surprisingly hard question to answer well. It was nonsense, but to explain why it was nonsense you had to work out quite which things the person asking it didn't know, and what completely incorrect narrative he'd arrived at to think that this was going to happen. He'd heard'packet' and'mobile' and added 2 2 to get 22.

As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from now. And we fantasise about encountering intelligent aliens – generally, ones who are far more advanced than we are. Lately those strands have begun to merge. From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves.

Mr Toyoda Toyota president announced that the car company would be launching a research company in silcon valley to develop artificial intelligence for use in cars and robotics. The Toyota research institute according to the company press release would make drive accessible to everyone regardless of inability. However the new company, which will have 200 employees and launch in 2016, will be looking to go "beyond" autonomous cars. Health, mobility and personal well being robotics to improve all aspects of human life. Toyota has previously said its first self-driving car will be out by 2020 and it has produced some robots which includes a series of nursing bots to help those with physical impairments.

Some of Japan's banks and insurance companies have started using artificial intelligence to handle customers' inquiries more efficiently over the phone and online. Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ's smartphone app features MAI, a virtual bank teller, who can respond to customers by understanding the nature of their queries. For instance, if a customer says, "I lost my ATM card," MAI will recognize the situation and tell the customer what to do. The Android version of the app has already been released. The iPhone version is expected to become available by the end of this month.

It might not happen anytime soon, but then again, it might. In Japan, a short novel co-written by an artificial intelligence program (its co-author is human) made it past the first stage of a literary contest, the Japan News reports. The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award is named after Hoshi Shinichi, a Japanese science fiction author whose books include "The Whimsical Robot" and "Greetings from Outer Space." Judges for the prize weren't told which novels were written by humans and which were penned by human-computer teams. The award is unique in that it accepts entries from "applicants who are not human beings (AI programs and others)."

Your Fitbit (or whatever it is the activity-enlightened wear these days) can make a pretty good guess at how many calories you're burning through. And it can do it without any input from you. But if you want to keep track of how many you're putting in, you'll still need to do some work yourself, even if it's only choosing from a menu on an app. Inspired by that asymmetry, State University of New York at Buffalo computer scientist Wenyao Xu and colleagues at Northeastern University in China developed Autodietary, a necklace-like gadget that attempts to tell what you're eating. The device senses sounds from your neck to categorize your meal.

UPDATE Mar 12th 2016: AlphaGo has won the third game against Lee Sedol, and has thus won the five-game match. That was the score, as The Economist went to press, in the latest round of the battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and the naturally evolved sort. The field of honour is a Go board in Seoul, South Korea--a country that cedes to no one, least of all its neighbour Japan, the title of most Go-crazy place on the planet. To the chagrin of many Japanese, who think of Go as theirs in the same way that the English think of cricket, the game's best player is generally reckoned to be Lee Sedol, a South Korean. Mr Lee is in the middle of a five-game series with AlphaGo, a computer program written by researchers at DeepMind, an AI software house in London that was bought by Google in 2014.

Image Comics have a big June coming up. They are launching Midnight Of The Soul from Howard Chaykin, She Wolf from Rich Tommaso, an artist's roof edition of Injection, and the return of Frank Quitely to Mark Millar's Jupiter's Legacy for the second book…. The sequel to industry sales-beast JUPITER'S LEGACY is back and it boasts monthly FRANK QUITELY! Superhero offspring Hutch and Chloe have come out of hiding with son Jason to assemble a team of super-crooks from around the globe. It's 1950, and Joel Breakstone, former GI and liberator of Auschwitz, is seriously damaged goods.

The Justice Department has charged three current or former members of the so-called Syrian Electronic Army for computer hacking-related conspiracies. The charges were unsealed Tuesday in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Virginia. Prosecutors allege that two Syrians, 22-year-old Ahmad Umar Agha and 27-year-old Firas Dardar, tricked email users to steal usernames and passwords to compromise government, media and private-sector computer systems. In April 2013 they allegedly tweeted from the Associated Press account on Twitter falsely claiming a bomb had exploded at the White House and injured the president. None of them are in custody.

The ability to access and use financial services is critical to managing day-to-day life, weathering unexpected events, and capturing opportunities. Yet, some 46 percent of working-age adults in developing countries remain excluded from the formal financial system. It means they use the age-old informal mechanisms such as the moneylender, the pawnbroker, or the rotating savings club that can be unreliable and very expensive. In developed countries, working families are more likely to be under- or badly served rather than outright excluded. In the US, for example, every year some 25 million households use alternative services such as payday lenders or check cashers.