Techscape: The biggest tech stories of 2023 – from cyber warfare to AI’s ‘existential risk’

Crypto's crown slipped, an AI godfather spoke out and Apple entered the stuttering VR market - the stories that really mattered this year

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Merry Christmas! We have made it - almost - through another year without being churned into paste by a super-intelligent AI, conscripted into a Martian work camp by an insane billionaire or forced offline by a Carrington event.

Even in the absence of civilisation-altering events it's been a busy year. But the advantage of a slow week (I hope that isn't tempting fate) is that you can reflect on the past 12 months and realise that, sometimes, there's only a few stories that really matter.

The Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident.

We believe this was a criminal ransomware attack, and not the specific targeting of the Guardian as a media organisation," said Guardian Media Group's chief executive, Anna Bateson and the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.

The UK government is at high risk of a catastrophic ransomware attack" that could bring the country to a standstill" because of poor planning and a lack of investment, a parliamentary committee has warned.

Future ransomware attacks could pose a threat to physical security or safety of human life", the report said, if cyber-attackers manage to sabotage CNI operations. The report also warned that cyber-physical systems" could be intercepted, including hackers taking control of the steering and throttle of a shipping vessel - lab experiments have shown this to be achievable.

You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we're more intelligent than a frog. And it's going to learn from the web, it's going to have read every single book that's ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice." ... My confidence that this wasn't coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better."

Intelligence has nothing to do with a desire to dominate. It's not even true for humans. If it were true that the smartest humans wanted to dominate others, then Albert Einstein and other scientists would have been both rich and powerful, and they were neither.

With Vision Pro, you're no longer limited by a display. Your surroundings become an infinite canvas," the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, said. Vision Pro blends digital content into the space around us. It will introduce us to spatial computing.

Apple Vision Pro will change the way we communicate, collaborate, work and enjoy entertainment," Cook added. The company compared the device to a new TV, surround sound system, powerful laptop, and games console all in one - before revealing its price, an eye-watering $3,499, $500 more than the already high pricetag rumoured in the run-up to the event. The device will ship early next year" in the US, Apple said. No dates or prices were given for other regions.