The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to "AI efficiency". In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike's chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business. "We're operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs," he said. Kurtz said AI "flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster", adding it "drives efficiencies across both the front and back office". "AI is a force multiplier throughout the business," he said.

More than a decade has passed since the British government issued an apology to the mathematician Alan Turing. The tone of pained contrition was appropriate, given Britain's grotesquely ungracious treatment of Turing, who played a decisive role in cracking the German Enigma cipher, allowing Allied intelligence to predict where U-boats would strike and thus saving tens of thousands of lives. Unapologetic about his homosexuality, Turing had made a careless admission of an affair with a man, in the course of reporting a robbery at his home in 1952, and was arrested for an "act of gross indecency" (the same charge that had led to a jail sentence for Oscar Wilde in 1895). Turing was subsequently given a choice to serve prison time or undergo a hormone treatment meant to reverse the testosterone levels that made him desire men (so the thinking went at the time). Turing opted for the latter and, two years later, ended his life by taking a bite from an apple laced with cyanide.

"Better Than Us," Netflix's first original streaming series from Russia, transports audiences to a city only 10 years in the future, where robots serve the population in a variety of positions, some have even replaced humans for certain jobs. They look like the humans they serve, though there is a detached air to their presence and slightly stilted way of moving that make them visibly different. Netflix describes the series as "cyberpunk." Popular culture entertainment is often a way for us to imagine a scenario or event that may never occur in our individual lifetimes. Imagining a future, say, where artificial intelligence (AI) has been integrated into society not simply as a complex web of computational frameworks as we acknowledge and accept it currently, but in the form of robotics that look, and act similar to humans.

A former electronics whiz kid, he has squandered his youth on dilettantish studies in physics and anthropology, followed by a series of botched get-rich-quick schemes. His parents are dead, his friends (if they exist) go unmentioned, and his employment consists of forex trading on an old laptop in his two-room apartment. He seems to leave home only to buy chocolate at a local newsstand or, once, after noticing a pain in his foot, to have an ingrown toenail removed, an apt literalization of his enervating self-involvement. Perhaps out of some desire for correction, Charlie sells his mother's house to finance the purchase of Adam, one of twenty-five cutting-edge androids built to serve as an "intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum." The impulsive slacker is all too ready to exchange his birthright for a mess of wattage.

Each new year brings a frisson of excitement among book lovers as they anticipate the happy hours ahead absorbed in a library's worth of fresh reads. And 2019 looks to be bumper year. To whet your appetite we've picked a selection of fiction titles from a range of established and new authors. The list is by no means exhaustive. It may not even end up tempting you.

Insurtech -- AKA insurance technology -- is the catch-all term to describe the new wave of startups and innovation that are changing the decades-old sector. Developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT) connecting millions of devices and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular are two of the major trends that are making headway in insurance. Insurtech has been named the new fintech in part due to the amount of funding the new sector has started attracting. Research by Willis Towers Watson Securities, the investment banking boutique, found that tnsurtech startups attracted $238m in investment in the first quarter of 2017 alone, showing that the technology is starting to take off. Technology now has the ability to change, or at least improve, the customer relationship and AI is at the centre of it.