Neuromancer begins with a brilliant, highly memorable line: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." The novel was first published in 1984, when very few people had access to computers. Famously, William Gibson wrote the book on a typewriter. But despite this, it goes on to draw a vivid portrait of a futuristic world where data is currency and business is done in "cyberspace", though companies can also be hacked into and robbed. And, shimmering mysteriously in the background, there are powerful AIs that no one really understands.

In the summer of 1985, I made the long pilgrimage from my home in Cheadle Hulme to London's glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore computer show. As a 14-year-old gamer, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I was also desperate to visit one particular exhibitor: the publisher Newsfield, home of the wildly popular games mags Crash and Zzap!64. By the time I arrived there was already a long queue of kids at the small stand and most of them were waiting to have their show programmes signed by reigning arcade game champion and Zzap reviewer, Julian Rignall. As an ardent subscriber, I can still remember the thrill of standing in that line, the latest copy of the mag clutched in my sweaty hands. I wouldn't feel this starstruck again until I met Sigourney Weaver a quarter of a century later.

This research paper presents a unique Bengali OCR system with some capabilities. The system excels in reconstructing document layouts while preserving structure, alignment, and images. It incorporates advanced image and signature detection for accurate extraction. Specialized models for word segmentation cater to diverse document types, including computer-composed, letterpress, typewriter, and handwritten documents. The system handles static and dynamic handwritten inputs, recognizing various writing styles. Furthermore, it has the ability to recognize compound characters in Bengali. Extensive data collection efforts provide a diverse corpus, while advanced technical components optimize character and word recognition. Additional contributions include image, logo, signature and table recognition, perspective correction, layout reconstruction, and a queuing module for efficient and scalable processing. The system demonstrates outstanding performance in efficient and accurate text extraction and analysis.

One unlikely day during the empty-belly years of the Great Depression, an advertisement appeared in the smeared, smashed-ant font of the New York Times' classifieds: Five hundred college graduates, male, to perform secretarial work of a pleasing nature. Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied; five hundred were hired ("they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant"). They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising "a new plan of universal knowledge." In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars.

Neural networks have become shockingly good at generating natural-sounding text, on almost any subject. If I were a student, I'd be thrilled--let a chatbot write that five-page paper on Hamlet's indecision!--but if I were a teacher I'd have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the quality of student essays is about to go through the roof. On the other, what's the point of asking anyone to write anything anymore? Luckily for us, thoughtful people long ago anticipated the rise of artificial intelligence and wrestled with some of the thornier issues.

On Wednesday, a designer and engineer named Arvind Sanjeev revealed his process for creating Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The "ghost" inside the machine comes from OpenAI's GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine. To create Ghostwriter, Sanjeev took apart an electric Brother AX-325 typewriter from the 1990s and reverse-engineered its keyboard signals, then fed them through an Arduino, a low-cost microcontroller that is popular with hobbyists. The Arduino then sends signals to a Raspberry Pi that acts as a network interface to OpenAI's GPT-3 API.

On Wednesday, a designer and engineer named Arvind Sanjeev revealed his process for creating Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The "ghost" inside the machine comes from OpenAI's GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine. To create Ghostwriter, Sanjeev took apart an electric Brother AX-325 typewriter from the 1990s and reverse-engineered its keyboard signals, then fed them through an Arduino, a low-cost microcontroller that is popular with hobbyists. The Arduino then sends signals to a Raspberry Pi that acts as a network interface to OpenAI's GPT-3 API.

Objective To determine whether artificial intelligence (AI) can generate plausible and engaging titles for potential Christmas research articles in The BMJ . Design Observational study. Setting Europe, Australia, and Africa. Participants 1 AI technology (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, GPT-3) and 25 humans. Main outcome measures Plausibility, attractiveness, enjoyability, and educational value of titles for potential Christmas research articles in The BMJ generated by GPT-3 compared with historical controls. Results AI generated titles were rated at least as enjoyable (159/250 responses (64%) v 346/500 responses (69%); odds ratio 0.9, 95% confidence interval 0.7 to 1.2) and attractive (176/250 (70%) v 342/500 (68%); 1.1, 0.8 to 1.4) as real control titles, although the real titles were rated as more plausible (182/250 (73%) v 238/500 (48%); 3.1, 2.3 to 4.1). The AI generated titles overall were rated as having less scientific or educational merit than the real controls (146/250 (58%) v 193/500 (39%); 2.0, 1.5 to 2.6); this difference, however, became non-significant when humans curated the AI output (146/250 (58%) v 123/250 (49%); 1.3, 1.0 to 1.8). Of the AI generated titles, the most plausible was “The association between belief in conspiracy theories and the willingness to receive vaccinations,” and the highest rated was “The effects of free gourmet coffee on emergency department waiting times: an observational study.” Conclusions AI can generate plausible, entertaining, and scientifically interesting titles for potential Christmas research articles in The BMJ ; as in other areas of medicine, performance was enhanced by human intervention. Dataset and full reproducible code are available at .

Say the word Apple today and we think of Steve Jobs' multi-billion-dollar technology company that spawned the iPhone and the Mac computer. But a decade before the California-based firm was even founded, Apple Electronics, a subsidiary of the Beatles' record label Apple, was working on several pioneering inventions – some of which were precursors of commonly available products today. Apple Electronics was led by Alexis Mardas, a young electronics engineer and inventor originally from Athens in Greece, known to the Beatles as Magic Alex. He died on this day in 2017, aged 74, and was one of the most colourful and mysterious characters in the Beatles' story. Dressed in a white lab coat in his London workshop, Mardas created prototypes of inventions that were set to be marketed and sold. These included the'composing typewriter' – powered by an early example of sound recognition – and a phone with advanced memory capacity.

In 1980, according to Inc., Apple's then-president Mike Scott sent out an office memo: "EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc. Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let's all use it! Goal: by 1-1-81, NO typewriters at Apple... We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let's prove it inside before we try and convince our customers."