The race to develop robotic hands, memories of legendary gigs and the sea as medicine for the brain

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days Our nimble, nerve-filled appendages are the most flexible part of the human skeleton. Many tasks that most people can do largely without thinking, from tying a pair of shoelaces to buttoning up a shirt, in fact require a complex set of neurological instructions and precise choreography. Amy Hawkins reported from Beijing on how the race to develop “embodied AI” focuses on creating dextrous hands to transform humanoid robots from gimmicks into useful products. double quotation markThe problem is that not only does AI train on human writing, but humans are stylistically influenced by AI, the interplay creating a kind of linguistic hall of mirrors. Short of an author admitting it, it’s hard to say for certain whether an individual piece of writing is AI or not. That uncertainty is a recipe for paranoia. As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, David Shariatmadari spoke to linguists about what really distinguishes human and machine writing, and asked novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson to reflect on the future of fiction in the age of Cha