Michael Read, director of Flight Operations from New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company, flies a Martin Jetpack during a demonstration at a water park in Shenzhen, China December 6, 2015. KuangChi Science Ltd, a Hong Kong-listed Chinese company and investor of Martin Aircraft, will sell the flying machine in mainland China for 1.6 million yuan ($249,902), according to the company. (Photo by Bobby Yip/Reuters)

U.S. Marine Lt. Ben Reid from 1/2 Charlie Company of Task Force Tarawa waits to be medivaced after being hit with shrapnel and a machine gun round, in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, on March 23, 2003. The Marines suffered a number of deaths and casualties during gun battles throughout the city. (Photo by Joe Raedle via The Atlantic)

A female Syrian soldier from the Republican Guard commando battalion drives a tank during clashes with rebels in the restive Jobar area, in eastern Damascus, on March 25, 2015. The female battalion, which was created nearly a year ago, consists of 800 female soldiers who are positioned in the suburbs of the Syrian capital where they monitor and secure the frontlines with snipers, rockets and machine guns. (Photo by Joseph Eid/AFP Photo)

A man stands in front of a display with an artificial coral inside the Davos Congress Center at the eve of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Sunday, January 15, 2023. The site specific data sculpture by media artist Refik Anadol based on approximately one billion coral images processed by machine learning classification models. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos from Jan. 16 until Jan. 20, 2023. (Photo by Markus Schreiber/AP Photo)

Every year, in the Rostov region of Russia, a group of 40 young and not so young rural workers compete in the Bison Track Show, or more affectionately known as: Russian Flying Tractor Racing. In front of crowds numbering up to 30,000 people, a series of smoke spilling, monstrous farming machines tear round an 8km mud track, plowing through lakes and dirt mounds, their turbos screaming and tyres scrabbling to find grip.

Jobisintown.de is a German online recruitment website. They have made these amazing advertisements with the slogan “Life’s too short for the wrong job”. Over the years they have come up with several other print adverts that have the same idea of real person operating the machine.

William Gibson is not one of the authors that spits out novels like a machine – in his long and fruitful career he has only published 11 novels andof short stories and articles in the tens each. Still his impact on modern literature was huge – the “noir prophet” of the cyberpunk subgenre (that he was one of the pioneers of) has predicted the rise of reality television, virtual reality, video games and the internet. He is a Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction writer, with a special eye for what the future might bring.