Way back in 2011 Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist with aspirations to be a public intellectual, published an essay entitled "Why Software Is Eating the World", predicting that computer code would take over large swaths of the economy. Thirteen years on, software now seems to be chomping its way through academia as well. This, at any rate, is one possible conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton shares the 2024 Nobel prize in physics with John Hopfield, and that the computer scientist Demis Hassabis shares half of the Nobel prize in chemistry with one of his DeepMind colleagues, John Jumper. The award to Hassabis and Jumper was, in a way, predictable, for they built a machine – AlphaFold2 – that enables researchers to solve one of the toughest problems in biochemistry: predicting the structure of proteins, the building blocks of biological life. Their machine has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200m proteins that researchers have identified.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shedding light on one of the most examined yet least understood experiences of modern life: the customer journey. From shopping malls and sports arenas, to train stations and city streets, C2RO is an AI-powered video analytics platform that captures anonymized data about people's movement so organizations can improve the customer experience. "We analyze human behaviour in physical spaces, and transfer it into actionable data," said Tim Heaney, vice president of sales at C2RO. "With a fact-based understanding of the amount of people coming into a space, how they move through it with whom, where they linger, and what they touch and eventually purchase, organizations can manage physical environments more efficiently to improve the customer experience and business results." A transportation organization used data from C2RO to improve subway train and bus terminal planning. "Based on the number of people boarding and leaving trains at certain times and days, as well as which direction they're headed at terminals, transportation managers could alleviate traffic crunches," said Heaney.

When the passionate heroine of DH Lawrence's infamous 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was looking for romance, she turned to her gamekeeper. Now, she's joined dating app Tinder - with the help of artist Libby Heaney. "There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe," Lawrence wrote in Lady Chatterley's Lover. "But the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea." If only Lady Chatterley, in her search for the perfect catch, had been on Tinder.