Every year, we are rewarded with a new round of technology upgrades. Faster processors, bigger and brighter screens, better cameras — a bounty that promises more rapid selfies, status updates and streaming entertainments. Forget peak oil, we have hit peak tech. For the more enlightened, that means something needs to change.

Spend enough time in LA, and you start to feel like you are living in a time loop. Burger joints, juice bars, coffee shops — it’s one long parade of endless franchise repetition. But after I complained one too many times, I was pulled aside and informed in a hushed tones that I had it all wrong. ‘You just need to know about the secret menus’, explained a friend of mine. And she was right. I did need to know. Because even the most banal of brands, it turns out, have back doors.

There is a wonderful turning point in the movie ‘Fresh’ (1994) when 12-year-old Michael, surrounded by violence, drug dealers and ghetto enforcers, applies his father’s chess lessons to eliminating the forces that oppose him. Games are more than mere pastimes; they are frameworks for thinking. That is also why they make great teaching tools for humans and machines alike.

I am not entirely sure how it happened — but somehow in the last few years, I lost my connection with music. It could have been any number of things: throwing out my CD covers after I had ripped their insides, discarding playlists whilst moving between computers, a brief but horrific dalliance with iTunes Match or surfing the banal infinitudes of Spotify. Whatever the reason, the result was unequivocal — I had stopped listening to music, and had started consuming it.