The capsule, which costs £280,000, is ideal for those who find daily grooming exhausting. Imagine if it brushed your teeth for you, too ...

Still trying and failing to plan a trip to Japan , I have at least found one absolute must: a pilgrimage to see the Future Human Washing Machine. Following its unveiling last year , this JPY 60m (£280,000) capsule, in which a person is washed, thanks to the magic of microbubbles , and returned to the world in 15 minutes without moving a muscle is now on show in electronics shops in Tokyo .

It’s essentially a hi-tech car wash, but for humans: the dream. As my best friend says, “I have never needed anything more.” The two of us bond, frequently, over how unnecessarily exhausting getting clean is. She has long Covid; I’m just lazy and find getting clean such a drag I need a few minutes scrolling on the bathroom floor to recover (if this worries anyone, no, I’m not deficient in anything except moral fibre).

Definition of green facilities made in 2022, before release of ChatGPT, says Action to Protect Rural Scotland

A Scottish government policy designed to encourage datacentres to build in Scotland could lead to a massive volume of carbon emissions being ignored, according to an analysis by a Scottish charity.

“Green datacentres” are at the heart of Scotland’s ambitions to develop economically. Enshrined in national policy , they are part of a larger, UK-wide effort to attract big AI investment to Scotland.

Anna Wintour has welcomed the Bezoses – and their patronage – with open arms. But after a controversial Met Gala, industry insiders are less enthusiastic

The press conference for the Met Costume Institute’s spring exhibition is always a stately affair, but this year it was giving “feudal lady addresses her serfs” or perhaps “Marie Antoinette during the last days of Versailles”. Here, among the spectacular marble sculptures of the art museum’s American wing, was a beaming Lauren Sánchez Bezos , who Anna Wintour introduced as a “force for joy”, before adding that “she and her husband, Jeff, have shown with this event that they genuinely, genuinely care about giving back”. Meanwhile, in the outside world, protests against the Bezoses’ involvement had been raging for days. The discrepancy between the word on the street and the deference within the glass-ceilinged room was head-spinning.

The Met Gala has recently become a magnet for anti-excess protests, but this was its most controversial yet, owing to the $10m patronage of its honorary co-chairs, centibillionaires Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. It was not the first time Jeff Bezos bankrolled the gala – Amazon was its lead sponsor in 2012. But this year’s event came at a moment of soaring inequality, as Bezos’s personal wealth has mushroomed and his Donald Trump-appeasing decisions have made him less popular than ever with New York City’s left-leaning fashion and arts crowd.

As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move

Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.

It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.

Wendy Liu is a writer based in San Francisco and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley

Department for Transport is understood to back reducing levy, which critics have called a ‘pavement tax’

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Government officials considered cutting the VAT charged on electricity used at public EV chargers from 20% to 5% at the last budget, but the Treasury under chancellor Rachel Reeves rejected the proposal amid disagreement between departments.

Officials in the Department for Transport encouraged electric car charge point operators to write to the Treasury explaining how they would respond to a VAT cut, according to three industry sources. The charger companies said that they would pass the tax cut on to consumers.

PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence

UK companies are performing “yoga-level” stretches to describe themselves as AI specialists in an attempt to capitalise on the buzz around the technology, public relations firms have said.

Weary communications executives tasked with securing media coverage for brands have complained that bosses in low-tech industries or running businesses that use automation but not generative AI, are increasingly demanding they are pitched to journalists as artificial intelligence companies.

Darren Aronofsky among proponents of using technology, while Guillermo del Toro says he would ‘rather die’

Under a white marquee on Cannes’ Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across the horizon, the director Darren Aronofsky addressed an audience of executives and tech evangelists gathered for an “AI for Talent” summit.

“There’s so much pushback against AI,” said Aronofsky, who has faced criticism over his embrace of generative AI projects though his new studio, Primordial Soup, at a time when artificial intelligence has become one of the film industry’s most divisive fault lines.

Growing numbers of people are seeking improbable cosmetic surgery based on chatbots’ recommendations

Plastic surgeons are increasingly concerned about the rise of “AI face”, as more and more clients arrive in their offices with unrealistic AI-generated visions of what they want to look like.

Dr Nora Nugent, a cosmetic surgeon from Tunbridge Wells, has seen this first hand. Clients have started coming to her office with photos of themselves beautified by AI and a false expectation that those results are achievable with surgery. She is also the president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, and says many colleagues are having similar experiences.

BioOrbit hopes drug-crystallisation technology will lead to self-injected cancer treatment that could save millions

Onboard a SpaceX flight last week was a remarkable piece of cargo – a hi-tech box destined for the International Space Station to grow ultra-pure protein crystals, with the aim of producing self-injected cancer drugs.

A British startup, BioOrbit, has developed the drug-crystallisation technology at its labs in London and launched Box-E, a compact unit the size of a microwave, on the 15 May rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.