Just before the election, I went to see a play. It was staged for a small group, was about ninety minutes long, and was followed by a Q. & A. For all that time, the audience sat quietly, respectful and absorbed, listening intently to what was said. Afterward, during cocktail hour, I stood with another guest, a scientist who works in artificial intelligence. Almost immediately, we started talking about the rapid progress of A.I. systems that work with words. "Have you tried ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode?" he asked me.

They advance to more complex multiplayer games like hide and seek or capture the flag, where teams compete to be the first to find and grab their opponent's flag. The playground manager has no specific goal but aims to improve the general capability of the players over time. AIs like DeepMind's AlphaZero have beaten the world's best human players at chess and Go. But they can only learn one game at a time. As DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg put it when I spoke to him last year, it's like having to swap out your chess brain for your Go brain each time you want to switch games.

Scientists have been inspired by Pacman to create a plastic-eating'cocktail', which could help eradicate plastic waste. It's made up of two enzymes – called PETase and MHETase – produced by a type of bacteria that feeds on plastic bottles, called Ideonella sakaiensis. Unlike natural degradation, which can take hundreds of years, the super-enzyme is able to convert the plastic back to its original'building blocks' in a few days. The two enzymes work together like'two Pac-men joined by a piece of string' munching down snack pellets in the popular video game. The new super-enzyme digests plastic up to six times faster than the original PETase enzyme alone, which was discovered by the team in 2018.

Much like our ancestors, we live in an epoch of two worlds that compete and coexist. There's nothing more fascinating to me than the image of sitting outside on a cool evening drinking ice-water, watching stars sprinkle onto the Belt of Venus, listening to cicadas right alongside a companion robot. A social robot like Pepper could fill that niche for me. Yet when I tell people about this, many find it comical, if not jarring. Robots like Pepper look a tad creepy.

I don't think the future of VR looks like video games; I don't think it looks like cinematic VR; I think it looks like stories from our real lives. It's the most amazing afternoon you've ever had. For one person, it might be what we call a rom-com, for another it might be an action movie. For another, it might be something we don't have a movie genre preexisting for. It might be just exploring.