A major focus of Computer Weekly's technology and ethics coverage in 2022 was on working conditions throughout the tech sector, from the issue of forced labour and slavery throughout technology supply chains, to UK Amazon workers staging spontaneous "wildcat" strikes in response to derisory pay rises and warehouse conditions. Other stories in this vein included coverage of accusations that "soft union-busting" tactics were used by app-based food delivery firm Deliveroo to scupper its workers' grassroots organising efforts, and the ongoing court case against five major tech firms for their alleged role in the maiming and deaths of people extracting raw materials in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Artificial intelligence (AI) also featured heavily in Computer Weekly's technology and ethics coverage in 2022, with stories published on the tech sector's lacklustre commitment to "ethical" AI, as well as on the pitfalls and challenges of auditing AI-powered algorithms. Police technology was another major focus of 2022, as policing bodies continue to push ahead with new tech deployments such as live facial recognition (LFR) despite serious concerns about its effectiveness, proportionality and efficacy. Other stories focused on how technology is developed and deployed, and the underlying power dynamics at play.

"While my company and the museum have distinct missions, both are important contributors to our society," said Whitney Museum of American Art vice chairman Warren B. Kanders. This statement, salvaged from a letter leaked by ARTnews in December, sets the tone as the opening visual for Forensic Architecture's installation at the Whitney Biennial--a 15-minute video delivering the collective's most recent foray into artificial intelligence, titled Triple Chaser. The London-based architecture and science research group chose to respond to the Kanders tear gas and munitions scandal not with a withdrawal from the biennial, but with the creation of a work of art-as-social justice tool, a submission that infiltrates the subject of derision's own institution. Their video, created in collaboration with director Laura Poitras and Praxis Films, is narrated by David Byrne cooly explaining how FA approached the training of a computer program to track and recognize images of "Triple Chaser" tear gas canisters and subsequently reduce the amount of human labor needed to do so. The program is trained to recognize the canisters, so named for the way they break into three distinct pieces after being fired, and not become used to identifying just the degraded landscapes they usually occur in.

The British installation at the London Design Biennale is an international project that demonstrates how victims of human rights violations around the world can gather proof of their own experiences. Plastic bottles, digital cameras and kites, just some of the low-cost items in the exhibition, are being used in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq to gather the remaining evidence of Isis's 2014 treatment of the Yazidi ethnic minority, treatment that survivors and their supporters have called genocide and hope to prosecute in the international courts. Not only do they say thousands were killed by the terrorist group and thousands more displaced, but Yazidi cultural and religious heritage sites were destroyed and their temples were used as mass graves. Four years later, the region is still dangerous, littered with landmines and booby-traps left by the militants as they retreated. So when Yazda, a global rights organisation established by the Yazidi diaspora, sought help in supplementing their documentation efforts from Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, its team of architects, photographers, software developers, lawyers and archaeologists adapted their investigative methods to provide ways for Yazidis to gather video and data without entering the most hazardous areas.

Despite the come-hitherness of the title Robot Sex, a couple of these'I-need-a-gift-for-a-geek' books are the sort where you may want to be out of town when the recipient calls you, depressed, with their feedback. The most fun of the lot is Thomas S Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter: A History. It's easy to forget that the ubiquitous single-shift typewriter keyboard, designed specifically for our relatively simple 26-letter alphabet and limited use of capital letters (2.5 percent to five percent of text), had competitors when it was originally designed. A typewriter for the Chinese language, which has some 47,000 characters but no alphabet or syllabic structure, seemed so absurd in 1900 that people published cartoons lampooning the idea (which Mullaney reprints). Reading Mullaney sends you looking for more details of those typewriter designs not taken.