I was born two years before the USSR ceased to exist. The largest country in the world disappeared overnight, replaced by the new largest country in the world, Russia. But the footprint it left took longer to be washed away. I grew up with a duvet cover printed with a world map prominently featuring the ex-nation, reading books and atlases that were published after I was born but before it vanished, and voraciously consuming science fiction that assumed the Soviets would continue to exist far into the future. Randall Munroe, author of the webcomic XKCD, once put together a flow chart to date almost any world map made since the 19th century to within a few years by answering some simple questions.

Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term "metaverse", and was one of Mark Zuckerberg's pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson's fictional world in reality. The plot revolves around an image that, when viewed in the metaverse, hijacks the viewer's brain, maiming or killing them. In the fiction of the world, the image crashes the brain, presenting it with an input that simply cannot be correctly processed. Perhaps the first clear example came four years earlier, in British SF writer David Langford's short story BLIT, which imagines a terrorist attack using a "basilisk", images which contain "implicit programs which the human equipment cannot safely run". In a sequel to that story, published in Nature in 1999, Langford draws earlier parallels, even pulling in Monty Python's Flying Circus, "with its famous sketch about the World's Funniest Joke that causes all hearers to laugh themselves to death".

With more than 4,000 shares, 20,000 comments, and 100,000 reactions on Facebook, the photo of the elderly woman, sitting behind her homemade 122nd birthday cake, has unquestionably gone viral. "I started decorating cakes from five years old," the caption reads, "and I can't wait to grow my baking journey." The picture is also unquestionably fake. If the curious candles – one seems to float in the air, attached to nothing – or the weird amorphous blobs on the cake in the foreground didn't give it away, then the fact the celebrant would be the oldest person in the world by almost five years should. Thankfully, the stakes for viral supercentenarian cake decorators are low.

Barely a day goes by without some new story about AI, or artificial intelligence. The excitement about it is palpable – the possibilities, some say, are endless. Fears about it are spreading fast, too. There can be much assumed knowledge and understanding about AI, which can be bewildering for people who have not followed every twist and turn of the debate. So, the Guardian's technology editors, Dan Milmo and Alex Hern, are going back to basics – answering the questions that millions of readers may have been too afraid to ask.

Technology changes so fast that our lives are radically different from even a decade ago, yet slowly enough that sometimes we don't even notice the changes. We live in the future, in other words, and sometimes it takes a moment to realise what an odd, and perhaps unsettling, future it is. So I'm going to try laying it out for you in plain English. Not one, but two, controversial billionaires have created projects aimed at reading minds. Elon Musk, the South African co-founder of PayPal, unveiled the latest step in his plan to build mind-reading implants two weeks ago.

In a tale of gambling addiction posted to Reddit shortly before Christmas, the numbers were as shocking as they were unsurprising. First the anonymous addict frittered away $200 (£149), in November 2016. Then $300, $400, $1,500 … eventually, by December 2017, a credit card debt of $16,000, too large to be kept a secret any longer. It's a painful narrative, one that's not softened through repeated telling. What might be more surprising is the particular type of gambling under discussion.