When it comes to the California DMV, is this a case of brand new year, same old tune? It's a positive sign that the massive bureaucracy's director has been checking out reader complaints about the license renewal process for drivers after age 70, and here's a news bulletin: He's even tossing out some of the crazy test questions that many of you have been griping about. I'll get to that in a moment, but first let's dip into the mail bag, which continues to overflow with tales from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Dave Warburton, 76, of Santa Clarita went to renew his license the first week of January and was told there was no record of his pre-registration in the computer system. "Not off to a good start," he wrote in an email.

Bedazzled executives are treated to a speech by a cartoon ghost. Someone's dog walks across a wall before reconfiguring its own body parts. Alan Warburton has created some truly mind-blowing images for his new documentary The Wizard of AI. But what's most impressive – or maybe most alarming – is the fact that he didn't actually create any of them at all. "I would say 99% of it was made using generative artificial intelligence tools," says the 43-year-old artist film-maker.

There is a laboratory deep within University College London (UCL) that looks like a cross between a rebel base in Star Wars and a scene imagined by Jules Verne. Hidden within the miles of cables, blinking electronic equipment and screens is a gold-coloured contraption known as a dilution refrigerator. Its job is to chill the highly sensitive equipment needed to build a quantum computer to close to absolute zero, the coldest temperature in the known universe. Standing around the refrigerator are students from Germany, Spain and China, who are studying to become members of an elite profession that has never existed before: quantum engineering. These scientists take the developments in quantum mechanics over the past century and turn them into revolutionary real-world applications in, for example, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, cryptography and medicine.

Tesla Inc.'s Elon Musk, who's built up an aura around how automated his car assembly plant will be, has good news for humans: We still need your help. "Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake," the CEO wrote in a tweet Friday, hours after CBS aired an interview in which he acknowledged putting too many robots in Tesla's lone auto factory. It was a significant concession by Musk, 46, who boasted less than a year ago that Tesla was building a competitive advantage over established automakers by programming robots to quickly produce vehicles. Instead, Tesla has struggled to hit targets for the Model 3, the first sedan the company has tried to mass-manufacture and eventually sell for as little as $35,000.