Dictating into my phone the other day, replying to a Telegram request from my daughter, I watched the words unroll on screen: “I don’t think the we remotes ever came back after Nik took them away the other day.” By the time I’d got to ‘Nik’, the screen had begun wobbling slightly; by the time I’d reached ‘day’, the word ‘we’ had been replaced by ‘Wii’. Awesome!

By chance, later that day I was catching up on the Weekend Guardian, as is my wont, and came across this letter:

The pros of ever more sophisticated software are considerable, omnipresent, and more compelling every day. But I’m sure it’s not just my generation that’s becoming increasingly uneasy about its immense and irreversible power, given the implications of some of its cons for the ways we experience the world, the ways we speak about the world, the ways we perceive the world – and our place in it.