The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?

The Spectrum faithfully recreates the 80s original with its rubber keys and classic games, delighting older gamers, while younger players may face a steep learning curve due to tricky controls and tough gameplay. However, modern features like save and rewind help mitigate that frustration. It was made with as few components as possible and connected easily to the TV. Programs ran from compact cassettes, some of you may remember listening to music from these before the advent of CDs. It was possible to program in Basic and play some games. The ZX Spectrum's competitor was the Commodore 64, a popular machine that Retro Games had already recreated.

In the summer of 1985, I made the long pilgrimage from my home in Cheadle Hulme to London's glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore computer show. As a 14-year-old gamer, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I was also desperate to visit one particular exhibitor: the publisher Newsfield, home of the wildly popular games mags Crash and Zzap!64. By the time I arrived there was already a long queue of kids at the small stand and most of them were waiting to have their show programmes signed by reigning arcade game champion and Zzap reviewer, Julian Rignall. As an ardent subscriber, I can still remember the thrill of standing in that line, the latest copy of the mag clutched in my sweaty hands. I wouldn't feel this starstruck again until I met Sigourney Weaver a quarter of a century later.

Very few Yugoslavians had access to computers in the early 1980s: they were mostly the preserve of large institutions or companies. Importing home computers like the Commodore 64 was not only expensive, but also legally impossible, thanks to a law that restricted regular citizens from importing individual goods that were worth more than 50 Deutsche Marks (the Commodore 64 cost over 1,000 Deutsche Marks at launch). Even if someone in Yugoslavia could afford the latest home computers, they would have to resort to smuggling. In 1983, engineer Vojislav "Voja" Antonić was becoming more and more frustrated with the senseless Yugoslavian import laws. "We had a public debate with politicians," he says.

For a period between the winter of 1983 and the summer of 1986, my life was completely dominated by the Commodore 64. The seminal home computer, launched 40 years ago this month, featured an 8-bit microprocessor, a huge 64k of memory and a set of graphics and sound chips that were designed by the engineers at Commodore's MOS Technology subsidiary to power state-of-the-art arcade games. Instead, Commodore president Jack Tramiel ordered the team to build a home computer designed to smash the Atari XL and Apple II. So that's what they did. I didn't know any of this when my dad brought home a C64 one afternoon a year after the launch of the machine.

Starting from the mid/late 1980's, many aspiring musicians (like me…) used the legendary Commodore Amiga computer to learn and compose music. Amiga's sound and graphics capabilities were pretty incredible compared to other home computers available at the time, and it quickly became popular among gamers, coders, graphic artists and musicians all over the world, and especially in Europe. Many Amiga musicians used a tracker, a type of music software that produces modules, or mods for short. A mod is a single file that contains everything necessary to play back a full song: notation, arrangement, song structure and instruments. As you might have guessed, trackers and mods were quite primitive by today's standards.

Just over a year has passed since the assassination of prime minister Olof Palme, a brutal and still unsolved handgun murder taking place in the heart of the nation's capital, Stockholm. Head of the ongoing police investigation, Hans Holmér, has just been forced to resign after cooking up increasingly incompetent and theatrical policing methods, lies and conspiracy theories. Cold war activity in the Baltic region is at peak levels. The navy regularly carry out large scale submarine hunts within Swedish territorial waters and the air force routinely scramble JA-37 Viggen interceptors in response to both Soviet and NATO counterparts scouting just outside national airspace. To fill the ranks of the armed forces, military service is mandated by universal conscription of all men aged 18 and above. Those who refuse to partake are punished by jail.

Manufactured by Swansea-based Dragon Data (an offshoot of traditional toy company, Mettoy), this 32k machine featured an advanced Motorola MC6809E central processor, decent keyboard and excellent analogue joypads. However, its eccentric graphics hardware gave every game a garish green tinge, and its most iconic gaming character was a bespectacled schoolboy named Cuthbert. Admittedly, I put the Dragon on the list instead of another great Swansea-made machine, the Sam Coupe, because I designed two hit games for the system: Impossiball and Utopia. Despite this, Dragon Data went bust in 1984. The first home computer to feature a colour graphical user interface and powered by a 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU, with 512KB of RAM, the Atari ST seemed like the future … until the Commodore Amiga arrived two months later.

The advent of Artificial Intelligence into the world we live in is furiously gaining momentum, where products like Google Duplex, Amazon Alexa, and others are finding residence in more and more mobility applications. Everyday cars are becoming more and more technologically advanced. But, says Hedley Judd, National Director of the Tyre, Equipment, Parts Association (TEPA), an association of the Retail Motor Industry Organisation (RMI), this should not be intimidating but rather exciting news for motorists. The motor vehicle has an Engine Control Unit (ECU), Body Control Module (BCM), screens of different types, and of course the communication system to the outside world, either via a WIFI-linked hotspot or a Bluetooth link to the cell network. "The ECU and the BCM are both effectively computers with processors and memory that are programmed to function according to set rules depending on the external input from the engine or the vehicle via the driver. The screens referred to are the infotainment screen and nowadays in many vehicles the instrument cluster has become a computer-like screen as well. Finally, the communication language would be understandable to the drivers of today's vehicles."

Figuring out the best way to market your products and/or services to your customers can be a tricky business. According to marketing trends for 2017, it doesn't look like it's getting any easier for businesses to effectively market their content either. Given all the additional resources a business has access to, one would think they would have a significant advantage when it comes to marketing, however no matter how much research a company does beforehand, the results of marketing campaigns are always unpredictable. As companies look to increase their sales growth and their customer base, it's only natural that they are looking for new and creative ways to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and bring back the maximum return on each dollar spent. In order to maximize the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, businesses and individuals need to take a step back and consider new approaches.