The dawn of 8K resolution television has arrived as a Japanese television network broadcasts the first programmes in the format. Japan's national public broadcasting organisation, NHK, is now sending both 4K and 8K channels via satellite to viewers. The first film shown in 8K will be '2001: A Space Odyssey' and Stanley Kubrick's classic film was scanned by Warned Bros on 70mm film negatives to produce the high-resolution masterpiece. This newest resolution has four times as many pixels vertically and horizontally as current top-end 4K Ultra HD screens, and 16 times more than standard 1080p HD. NHK is currently the only channel pushing for the 8K medium as specialist equipment and huge price-tags puts off consumers and companies alike.

If Japan, home to the world's largest public debt, wanted to save a bundle, it would close the Bank of Japan. Auctioning off its giant neo-baroque headquarter buildings around the nation and pink-slipping roughly 4,900 full-time employees would cheer Moody's and Standard & Poor's and plug holes in the national balance sheet. That's not going to happen, of course. But imagine if the BOJ had closed shop 17 years ago, right after it first cut interest rates to zero, and turned its function over to a computer program. Would the artificial-intelligence version of the BOJ be any closer to 2 percent inflation than the well-compensated humans occupying its buildings?