Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out - but it's going to take collective effort Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I'd spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me. The berries on a single spray might range from green through shades of red to the darkness that gives the fruit its name. Partly by sight and partly by touch, I determined which berries were too hard and which too soft, picking only the ones in between, while listening to birds and the hum of bees, to the music of water flowing, noticing small jewel-like insects among the berries, dragonflies in the open air, water striders in the creek's calm stretches. I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam - which was admittedly runny and seedy - but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.

The world's most powerful people have started to realise that games have immense influence - why else would the White House post an image of Trump as Halo's Master Chief? The world's most powerful people have started to realise that games have immense influence - why else would the White House post an image of Trump as Halo's Master Chief? State of play: who holds the power in the video games industry in 2025? I love playing video games, but what interests me most as a journalist are the ways in which games intersect with real life. One of the joys of spending 20 years on this beat has been meeting hundreds of people whose lives have been meaningfully enhanced by games, and as their cultural influence has grown, these stories have become more and more plentiful. There is another side to this, however.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Now and then, Feedback sees ads for courses promising to teach us how to become an excellent creative writer. It sounds like fun, but why learn to be a good writer when we can just do this stuff instead? One brand that recently caught Feedback's eye is BBC Maestro.

I'm Peter Singer AI," the avatar says. I am almost expecting it to continue, like a reincarnated Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to solve a problem. The problem I am trying to solve is why Peter Singer, the man who has been called the world's most influential living philosopher, has created a chatbot. And also, whether it is any good. Me: Why do you exist?

My friend walks into the village hall, scene of my son's third birthday party, a mixture of panic and incredulity creeping across his face. "I didn't realise we were dressing up," he says, taking in my outfit. I'm wearing a mint-green tulle midi dress with sheer sleeves that balloon precociously and a tiered skirt that puffs out in such a way as to give me the appearance of either a Quality Street or a three-year-old at her own birthday party. It's not, if I'm entirely honest, the most practical of outfits for serving chocolate cake to 18 sticky-handed toddlers but, as I blurt out to my friend, keen to dispel any confusion, the avant-garde look wasn't actually my choice: it was AI's. My wardrobe is my identity, my refuge, my hobby, my happy place. Or, at least, it was.

You'd probably notice if the car that cut you off or pulled up beside you at a light didn't have a driver. In the UK, self-driving cars are still required by law to have a safety driver at the wheel, so it is difficult to notice them. But car companies have been testing automated vehicles on UK roads at least since 2017. Self-driving cars use Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to steer themselves and navigate around obstacles. This technology is being introduced in many different ways, for example in cameras that detect whether people are speeding or using mobile phones while driving.

In 2021, linguist Emily Bender and computer scientist Timnit Gebru published a paper that described the then-nascent field of language models as one of "stochastic parrots". A language model, they wrote, "is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning." AI can still get better, even if it is a stochastic parrot, because the more training data it has, the better it will seem. But does something like ChatGPT actually display anything like intelligence, reasoning, or thought? Or is it simply, at ever-increasing scales, "haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms"?

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which starts today in Las Vegas, is an odd beast. It is the biggest technology event of the year, a sprawling conference that spills over multiple casinos and convention centres to dominate a city that is hard to overshadow. But for the better part of a decade it has been an afterthought for some of the world's biggest businesses, led by Apple realising that if you can get the press to come to you, you don't need to risk burying your product launches under hundreds of competing newslines. The result is that CES is no longer where you see the future, but where you learn how that future will get copied into a thousand cheap plastic knockoffs. There are, of course, exceptions.

With the most recent season of Black Mirror, you sensed that Charlie Brooker was keen to move away from his reputation as a prophet. Time and time again since his series hit the air, it has managed to correctly predict the future in all sorts of horrible ways. But this season felt like it was deliberately skewing away from reality precisely to avoid this happening again. After all, unless a hapless demon destroys Earth – or unless Britney Spears literally turns into a werewolf – then Brooker is probably in much safer territory. Reader, it has happened already.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the metaverse, which was quietly laid to rest a few weeks ago by its grieving adoptive parent, one Mark Zuckerberg. Those of you with long memories will remember how, in October 2021, Zuck (as he is known to his friends) excitedly announced the arrival of his new adoptee, to which he had playfully assigned the nickname "The Future". So delighted was he that he had even renamed his family home in her honour. Henceforth, what was formerly called "Facebook" would be known as "Meta". In a presentation at the company's annual conference, Zuckerberg announced the name change and detailed how his child would grow up to be a new version of cyberspace.