Joaquin Oliver was 17 years old when he was shot in the hallway of his high school. An older teenager, expelled some months previously, had opened fire with a high-powered rifle on Valentine's Day in what became America's deadliest high school shooting. Seven years on, Joaquin says he thinks it's important to talk about what happened on that day in Parkland, Florida, "so that we can create a safer future for everyone". But sadly, what happened to Joaquin that day is that he died. The oddly metallic voice speaking to the ex-CNN journalist Jim Acosta in an interview on Substack this week was actually that of a digital ghost: an AI, trained on the teenager's old social media posts at the request of his parents, who are using it to bolster their campaign for tougher gun controls.

My son has just been given a new toy car. It's small, blue and remarkably cute-looking for something that threatens one day to cost a lot of people their jobs. For what's unusual about this car is that it wasn't made in a distant Chinese factory before being shipped back to a warehouse here, then trucked to a shop, or dumped on a doorstep by an overworked Amazon driver with no time to ring the doorbell. This one came straight off a 3D printer, one of those faintly space age-sounding gizmos that works a bit like a normal printer except that you load it with plastic fibres instead of paper, and then programme it to "print" a solid object according to your preferred design. It's slow and expensive now, which is why the car my son was given isn't really a toy but a marketing gimmick.