Four tech billionaires walk into a mansion. It sounds like the setup for a punch line, but it also forms nearly the entire conceit behind "Mountainhead," a savagely entertaining but somewhat shallow new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of "Succession." The film, which is streaming on HBO's Max, is a sort of chamber play, its stage a modernist castle in Utah--the Mountainhead of the title--overlooking snowy peaks. The players are a quartet of friends, or, more accurately, frenemies, who resemble a mishmash of real-world Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell plays Randall Garrett, the group's Peter Thiel-esque mentor who, not unlike the late Steve Jobs, has cancer that his doctor tells him is incurable.

There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We've just lived through a few weeks like that. We've known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity. And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US.

In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: "What are the contents of the'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?" He was using the term "canon" in the sense of "the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre", but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave. Greer's challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value 65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn't "the list of books that I think one ought to read – it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here".

A simultaneously familiar and slightly terrifying robot dog wanders through the audience of a session at the Sydney edition of South by South West. On stage, the panellists opine about a future increasingly defined by artificial intelligence and automation. "It's going to get much, much more significant," says Ed Santow, the former human rights commissioner and current director of policy and governance at the UTS Human Technology Institute. "And for many people that will be a good thing, [but] for a lot of people it'll be really, really hard." The robot is creepy but its fan is as noisy as a ps4 so it's not sneaking up on anyone.

"We can't let existential risks blind us to the challenges we face today," says Gina Neff, a tech expert at the University of Cambridge and co-chair of a new TUC taskforce on artificial intelligence in the workplace. "Those challenges are real, and they're faced by all of us." Rishi Sunak is hosting a global AI safety summit in November, amid hair-raising concerns raised by tech gurus – some of whom have even warned the technology could destroy humanity. Sunak, a Stanford graduate, is known at Westminster as a wannabe West Coast tech bro, with his branded hoodies and Palm Angels sliders, and has picked up on the "existential" threats highlighted by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Neff welcomes the prime minister's decision to call the summit. But today, without a hoodie in sight, she has come together with two fellow female tech experts – Dee Masters, an employment barrister, and the TUC campaigner Mary Towers – to discuss a more immediate, albeit less apocalyptic, threat from AI: the risk to workers' rights.

The pandemic has largely overwhelmed the news cycle over the past year and hence influencing and largely deflating the AI hype train. There were a few developments though which I'd consider significant. Some of them very well predicted by articles in this blog, and some surprising. Since it is 2021 after all, the most immediate AI flop is related to Tesla robotaxis or rather lack thereof. Elon Musk promised that Tesla would achieve L5 autonomy by the end of 2020 back in April 2019 when he needed to raise money [and reiterated in April 2020].

Women are bearing the brunt of jobs losses brought on by increased automation, while men are benefiting from the best-paid new jobs on the market, according to new research from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Up to 400,000 roles held by women in the public sector, banking and retail have been lost since 2011 due to a combination of automation and austerity measures, the RSA said. Female workers have further lost out because of the fall in private-sector roles such as retail cashiers, personal assistants and hairdressers, according to the analysis. The RSA found that programmers and software developers as well as HR managers and directors were among the top 20 fastest growing occupations, while retail cashiers and checkout operators were among the fastest shrinking. Many jobs in the new economy are well paid but the research found only one in 20 new coders and programmers are women.

Hollywood has a history of drawing on collective fears. The dawn of the atomic age saw a boom in world-ending disasters, James Bond battled Russians all throughout the cold war, and the post-9/11 era saw a grimly predictable rise in Arab and Muslim bad-guys. And so it follows, that in the past few years – as the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have accrued more power, wealth and influence than most governments – the face of villainy has changed again. Since the turn of the decade, blockbusters have increasingly cast Silicon Valley's tech-bros as supervillains. And it's not hard to see why.