Boffins at Portsmouth University have designed a computer which will decide when a Search & Rescue should be called off.

It will determine, after some poor soul is lost at sea, when he or she won’t be worth searching for anymore. In other words when he or she is dead.

This will save the risks taken by rescuers, they say. Of course the saving of money doesn’t come into it.

My experience with computed intelligence at banks, with insurance companies, and with all aspects of commerce, travel and enquiry in modern life has been abysmal.

The system is to be ‘rolled out’, in contemporary corporate parlance, across the US. But it will of course eventually re-cross the Atlantic to be used here. Our lives will soon be hanging by a fibre-optic thread.

Try telling Tony Bullimore, who spent six days under his capsized boat in the Southern Ocean this is a good idea.