By 2035, developers will have learned to automate many jobs. Investments in artificial intelligence (A.I.) and robotics will surge, displacing workers. And a more connected world will increase -- not reduce -- differences, increasing nationalism and populism, according to a new government intelligence assessment prepared just in time for President-elect Donald Trump's administration. The "Global Trends" report, unveiled Monday, is produced every four years by the National Intelligence Council. It is released just before the inauguration of a new or returning president.

More medicine is blessed with cures and treatments that were once considered pure science fiction. Computerised scanners that can'see' inside the body, robots that perform intricate surgery and man-made implants to replace worn out body parts are commonplace on the NHS. And now there are a range of high-tech devices that can monitor your health in the comfort of your own home. Can tilting the bed really stop you snoring? 'New technology is excellent for encouraging patients to take an interest in their own health,' says Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs. 'It can be beneficial for patients with chronic conditions.'

Foreign residents in Japan may be at a disadvantage in some ways, but they are by no means powerless nor on their own, says Tokyo-based nonprofit organization Asian People's Friendship Society (APFS). In a recently launched program series, the organization is nurturing a new group of volunteers it calls "foreign community leaders" who will assist fellow non-Japanese trying to navigate life amid a different and foreign culture. "Long-term foreign residents have incredible know-how on how to get by in their everyday lives in Japan," says Jotaro Kato, the head of APFS. "I want people to know that there are foreigners out there who can speak perfect Japanese" and who can provide guidance if needed. Targeting long-term foreign residents with a high level of proficiency in the Japanese language, the 30-year-old organization is spearheading the project to groom such veterans so they can help newcomers overcome a variety of everyday obstacles, such as dealing with language barriers, cultural differences and visa conundrums. For its part, APFS has organized a series of lectures and workshops that are currently taking place every other Saturday in a community hall in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, in which experts from many different fields discuss topics important to foreign residents.

Cybersecurity was all over the news in 2016 – whether it was email breaches that compromised the Democrat campaign for the elections, or revelations towards the end of the year that planes were vulnerable to hacking through in-flight entertainment systems. The British government boasted that it had the capabilities to launch cybersecurity offensives and was committing a huge chunk of its budget to developing these further. Yahoo suffered from an attack that potentially gained access to 1 billion accounts, the largest known breach of all time. Vendors, hackers, banks, businesses, countries and shadowy state actors all seem locked in a perpetual game of cat and mouse – and highly sophisticated and organised malicious attackers seem to have the upper hand. According to the experts, here are some of the cybersecurity nightmares organisations will have to wrangle with in 2017.

"Jia Jia" can hold a simple conversation and make specific facial expressions when asked, and her creator believes the eerily life-like robot heralds a future of cyborg labour in China. Billed as China's first human-like robot, Jia Jia was first trotted out last year by a team of engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China. Team leader Chen Xiaoping sounded like a proud father as he and his prototype appeared Monday at an economic conference organised by banking giant UBS in Shanghai's futuristic financial centre. Chen predicted that perhaps within a decade artificially intelligent (AI) robots like Jia Jia will begin performing a range of menial tasks in Chinese restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals and households. "In 5-10 years there will be a lot of applications for robots in China," Chen said.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have finally cracked problems that they've worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line. In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too, in its own particular ways. Some applications of blockchains to AI are mundane, like audit trails on AI models. Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself -- AI DAOs. All of them are opportunities. This article will explore these applications. Before we discuss applications, let's first review what's different about blockchains compared to traditional big-data distributed databases like MongoDB. We can think of blockchains as "blue ocean" databases: they escape the "bloody red ocean" of sharks competing in an existing market, opting instead to be in a blue ocean of uncontested market space. Famous blue ocean examples are Wii for video game consoles (compromise raw performance, but have new mode of interaction), or Yellow Tail for wines (ignore the pretentious specs for wine lovers; make wine more accessible to beer lovers). By traditional database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughput, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on.

A scarf designed to filter out harmful elements in city air. A breast pump that fits into a bra and keeps track of pumping volume. A drone that can dive into water and help anglers catch a big one. CES 2017, the consumer tech event held in Las Vegas this week, featured vendors with automated baubles, humanoid robots and "smart" everything -- a dishwasher, hairbrush and lawnmower, to name a few. But it's not so much the gadgets as their underlying technology that will make CIOs -- who seek out new tools for business, not the home or yard -- stop, look and listen.

It was a disappointing holiday season for French drone maker Parrot. The company announced Monday that it will lay off about 290 employees -- or more than a third of the employees currently working on drone-related projects -- after it missed fourth quarter sales targets by about 15 percent. Parrot's drone line has always straddled the line between executive toys and high-end gadgetry, and according to the company's announcement, the first order of business in 2017 will be to refocus its product offerings to concentrate on the most profitable areas. Parrot cites extremely low margins in the consumer drone space as the main reason for the layoffs, so we won't be surprised if we see fewer one-off jumping, flying and seafaring minidrones as the company continues to grow up with more prosumer-level devices like the Bebop 2 or the fixed-wing Disco in the future. As Recode notes, Parrot's main competitor DJI has been dominating the consumer drone space by slashing prices and cutting into profit margins, which it can pull off because it also owns the manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen.

Deep learning is impacting everything from healthcare to transportation to manufacturing, and more. Companies are turning to deep learning to solve hard problems, like speech recognition, object recognition, and machine translation. One of the most impressive achievements this year was AlphaGo beating the best Go player in the world. With the victory, Go joins checkers, chess, othello, and Jeopardy as games machines have defeated human at. While beating someone at a board game might not seem useful on the surface, this is a huge deal.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is primarily known as the company that revolutionized computer gaming. The debut of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in 1999 provided gamers with faster, clearer, and more lifelike images. The GPU was designed to quickly perform complex mathematical calculations that were necessary to accelerate the creation of realistic graphics. It achieved this feat by performing many functions at the same time, known as parallel computing. This resulted in faster, smoother motion in game graphics and a revolution in modern gaming.