Whenever I fantasise about a couple of hours of uninterrupted relaxation during the chilly winter months, my mind immediately conjures up images of curling up on the sofa with a deliciously good book. And when summer eventually comes around, just swap the location to a sun lounger in the back garden (or somewhere more exotic). So with 2026 nearly upon us, join me for an eclectic taste of a few literary delights worth feasting upon over the next 12 months. It's the final instalment of Oseman's hit graphic novel series which has followed the lives of Nick and Charlie, two teenage boys who fall for each other at school. Along with their friends, we've followed all the ups and downs of their relationship as they navigated family drama, homophobia and mental health issues, alongside the joy of first love.

Artificial general Intelligence (AGI) researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky says AI innovation is far worse than the nuclear bomb and could lead to the death of everyone on earth. But that may not be entirely accurate, according to some of his peers, who believe the risks are overstated. Yudkowsky spoke in the wake of an open letter signed recently by several luminaries including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, billionaire Elon Musk, Gary Marcus, and others, calling for a six-month moratorium on large language AI training in the world. "If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter," he warned, in a recent article published by the Time Magazine. Also read: Trouble in ChatGPT Paradise?

For Bengaluru resident Srishti Shekhar, the stay-at-home situation and her last year of school made her try something she had never done before: online consultation to solve her acne issues. "I had been to two dermatologists before coming across Remedico's service on Instagram. The sign-up process was very easy and all I had to do was send a few photos and I had a treatment plan designed for me within a day," says Shekhar. Like Shekhar, thousands of Indians turned to the internet when going to a clinic seemed risky. By September, the number of internet subscribers in India had risen to 776.45 million, up from 718.74 million in December 2019--474.11

As consumers and employees integrate more of their lives into one intelligence-amplifying human augmentation, organizations will have to address issues of data transparency, privacy and autonomy. Security: Human augmentation technologies must achieve and maintain a known and acceptable state of security-related risk. This risk is across an attack surface that's no longer tied to a specific device or physical location, but may travel with the human subject. Privacy: Human augmentation provides the ability to access intimate knowledge and data about the human it's enhancing. That data must be protected.

Banking is and has been overdue for a makeover. For the most part, the majority of the banking industry is still antiquated but thanks to technological advances in the last couple of years, this is starting to change. I remember not so long ago standing in line for over 20 minutes to open my first bank account and thinking how ridiculous it was to wait so long to give someone else my money. Add to that, how many banks were charging so many fees, and consumers were starting to smarten up and realize that they did not have to accept that--the shift was bound to happen. As we enter into this first quarter of 2018, there are many changes that we will start seeing banks adopt.

Robots are getting smarter, and, if you listen to high-ranking digital execs at Coca-Cola and other major brands, they're coming for your advertising jobs. No one knows that better than the tech geeks at Team One's newly launched AI Lab, who are vowing to stay ahead of the machine-learning curve by surrounding themselves with all things futuristic in a stylish nook of the agency's cavernous Playa Vista, Calif., headquarters. The lab, a scaled-down re-creation of a smart home designed to look like a midcentury modern crash pad, is outfitted with Google Home, Amazon Echo, Philips Hue and a trunk full of cognitive toys. "It's a dedicated space to experiment and brainstorm," said Alastair Green, executive creative director, digital, who launched the agency's tricked-out, gadget-heavy VR Lab onsite last year. "We want to spark ideas and create better work with AI. And to answer the brands' question: 'What's the business case for it?'"

Year 1999, The Matrix introduced your neighbor, your dad, and pretty much every hacky-sacking college kid in the country to the idea that the real world around us … might not be so real. In the film, our trenchcoated protagonist Neo discovers that the world as he knows it is only an illusion, piped into his brain while his body sits submerged in a gooey chemical broth. The idea that we are not really here at all -- that life is just an illusion – is as old as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But The Matrix had that special sauce that made this mind-bending concept palatable to high schoolers shuffling around in JNCO jeans: guns, Keanu Reeves, and a soundtrack anchored by Rage Against the Machine. "Entering the Matrix" became pop-culture shorthand for the notion that technology could eventually deliver us from our mind-numbing reality and allow us to live in a faux universe of our own creation. Want to learn kung fu in seconds? Just take the red pill. A kid born in 1999 is just now old enough to rent the R-rated Matrix -- or more likely, stream it. Yet in those intervening 17 years, entering the Matrix has gone from a dystopian sci-fi dream to a waking reality. These days, a pair of $800 goggles can convince you to duck as dinosaurs shamble over you, drop the pit of your stomach as you peer off the ledge of an artificial skyscraper, and make you puke -- in real life -- after one too many loops in a computer-generated space fighter. And yup, you can freeze time and stop bullets, too.