New Worlds – Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

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Don’t let the absence of a flying car in your garage distract you: we are definitely now living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson.

Every day I notice a news story that startles or alarms me, that feels like pure cyberpunk, nestled between reports about council bin collections and cabinet reshuffles.

“The first ever IV Drip clinic to appear in the centre of a shopping mall, our Westfield clinic is a must-stop shop when doing a bit of retail therapy. From Vitamin Drips to Instant Vitamin D Testing, Get A Drip Westfield has it all. Book your appointment today!”

Publicity for Get A Drip Limited

This made me think of Michael Moorcock’s habit of opening stories or chapters with startling newspaper clippings that revealed the future apocalypse already underway in the present, or Ballard’s typographic collages. So I began snipping.

“A video has been shared on social media with claims it shows a robotic dog patrolling the grounds of a ‘migrant hotel’. But this is false – while the footage does appear to show a robotic dog, it was filmed in the grounds of a building housing a religious group in Crewe.”

Full Fact, 4 November 2025

It’s not quite Blade Runner but it might be Robot Jox or Bubblegum Crisis.

“Soul ‘musician’ Sienna Rose has made headlines this week as suspicions mount that her music is a product of artificial intelligence… On Spotify, her sound is described as a blend of the ‘elegance of classic soul with vulnerability of modern R&B’, while she is simply referred to as ‘an anonymous neo-soul singer’. Many fans have taken note of the reference to her anonymity, which makes her 2.6million monthly listeners all the more staggering.”

NME, 17 January 2026

In the middle of a video about stationery and everyday tech on YouTube the other day there was a passing shot of two robots kickboxing in a cage; another robot was taking coffee orders at a kiosk. This was (blandly) “cool to see”.

“British police have helped seize a record nine-tonne haul of cocaine from a ‘narco sub’ in the Atlantic Ocean… The mammoth seizure weighed nearly as much as a school bus and the sub was 230 nautical miles from the Azores when it was intercepted… The semi-submersible eventually sank before authorities could take all its cargo, sending 35 of the 300 packages to the bottom of the Atlantic.”

Sky News, 27 January 2026

What the visionaries got wrong, it turns out, was what would go digital. Did anybody bet on cigarettes? Or scooters? Or that neon would be replaced by LEDs?

“A humanoid robot named Edward Warchocki chased away a herd of wild boars in Warsaw, shouting ‘Go away!’ in Polish as the animals fled into the forest, in video footage released on Sunday…”

Reuters, 14 April 2026

My personal moment of future shock came when a delivery robot trundled past me on Gloucester Road in Bristol, weaving between Saturday afternoon drunks and stoners, some of whom chased it and blocked its way.

“Four child-sized humanoid robots take the stage at an arena in eastern Seoul, and as the opening beats of a song by K-pop star G-Dragon begin, they start to dance… Arms swinging, legs stepping in sync, heads bobbing, wigs and baggy clothes swishing, until – mid-performance – one of them seemingly malfunctions and has to be removed from the stage… Welcome to Galaxy Robot Park, a new 16,500 square metre facility in Gangdong district that its creators claim is the world’s first robot theme park.”

The Guardian, 25 May 2026

More often, the shock is that there is no shock. My mum uses the voice-activated computer in her house to remind herself to take the sprouts off the boil.

“[Shania] Collins had enjoyed modest success as a sprinter, with contracts from Puma and Adidas. But by 2024, with her career stalled and earnings shrunk, she retired at 29 to begin a long screening process to follow her parents into working for the [Drug Enforcement Agency]… Then organizers of the Enhanced Games, a controversial sports startup, got in touch last fall with an offer. The organizers were planning a one-day competition of sprinting, swimming and weightlifting in Las Vegas that would not only allow but encourage doping. And it paid the kind of money that might take some athletes years to make — six-figure salaries, on top of prize money of up to $250,000 for event winners and $1 million for a world record.”

NBC News, 26 May 2026

All of this technological advancement, apparently utterly mundane and running in the backgrounds of our lives, is accompanied by a sense of apocalyptic weirdness both in the climate and the culture.

“Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones… Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called ‘NameTag’, identifies people captured by the...