The United States military has warned of an "environmental disaster" after an attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels on a cargo ship caused an oil slick in the Red Sea. The Iran-aligned group hit the United Kingdom-owned, Belize-flagged bulk carrier Rubymar on February 18 with multiple missiles. It was sailing through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, on its way to Bulgaria after leaving Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates. Extensive damage prompted the crew, all of whom are safe, to abandon the ship. US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed on Saturday that the ship was now "anchored but slowly taking on water", which it said has caused a 29-kilometre (18-mile) oil slick.

Last year, I coined 2021 the Year of Digitalism as I foresaw the increase of corporate and governmental data surveillance. Unfortunately, it is safe to say that this has come true with Big Tech becoming more powerful than ever before and governments worldwide implementing Covid tracking apps. What also happened is that the Pandemic has been a strong catalyst for digital transformation in any sector and that the world is currently changing at lightning speed. There are economic changes such as increasing inflation rates, environmental disasters caused by climate change, social changes such as The Great Resignation, and a convergence of technologies that drives technological changes. Although the world has never changed so fast as in 2021, this year was also the most stable of all the years to come in this decade.

Another reason for the excitement is that humans have always been fascinated by machines that appeared to be able to respond intelligently to what we say to them. In the mid-1960s, for example, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wanted to demonstrate the superficiality of human-machine interactions. So he wrote a program called Eliza that used pre-written scripts to respond to inputs. The most famous script, Doctor, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist – ie, one who simply parroted back at patients what they'd just said. Poor Weizenbaum, a gentle and innocent soul, was then astonished to find people apparently having serious consultations with Eliza.

Unless you've been holidaying on Mars, or perhaps in Spain (alongside the transport secretary), you may have noticed some fuss on social media about something called GPT-3. The GPT bit stands for the "generative pre-training" of a language model that acquires knowledge of the world by "reading" enormous quantities of written text. The "3" indicates that this is the third generation of the system. GPT-3 is a product of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab based in San Francisco. In essence, it's a machine-learning system that has been fed (trained on) 45 terabytes of text data. Given that a terabyte (TB) is a trillion bytes, that's quite a lot.

Unless you've been holidaying on Mars, or perhaps in Spain (alongside the transport secretary), you may have noticed some fuss on social media about something called GPT-3. The GPT bit stands for the "generative pre-training" of a language model that acquires knowledge of the world by "reading" enormous quantities of written text. The "3" indicates that this is the third generation of the system. GPT-3 is a product of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab based in San Francisco. In essence, it's a machine-learning system that has been fed (trained on) 45 terabytes of text data. Given that a terabyte (TB) is a trillion bytes, that's quite a lot.