Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on endless Poldark, a happy day and life beyond the smartphone

“An era beyond smartphones” is the promise of a new device called the AI Pin, a tiny badge which may one day do everything a smartphone can do, plus translating your speech into any language and recording your every thought.

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Scything away – Aidan Turner is Ross in Poldark

How long before devices are so advanced and so intimately entangled with you as to be almost a part of you? When you die, we may need some legally-binding technical or religious event to mark the passing of you and the switching-off of your device. Silicon to ashes . . . .

I always regard tomorrow, November 21, as a happy day. You won't find it on any list of high days or holidays but it marks one month until the winter solstice when the sun stands still and lighter days beckon. This year, just to confuse things, the solstice falls in the early hours of December 22 but you take my point. So that's only four short weeks of increasing darkness before we start the long, brightening slope towards another summer. Rejoice, if only a little.