Creating a self-driving car should not be difficult, but it's taking a while. Autonomous vehicles have been making headlines for years now, yet few of us have ever been in one or even seen one. We know that flying planes is more difficult than driving cars, yet pilots have enjoyed autopilot for decades. The answer is clear, or more precisely, clear vision. Pilots have used autopilot for decades in clear, open skies.

Following years of mounting interest in a type of artificial intelligence (AI) called deep learning, the biggest public cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), today announced its first Amazon AI services that make use of deep learning. Deep learning generally involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as photos, and then getting them to make inferences about new data. One of AWS' top competitors, Google Cloud Platform, introduced the Cloud Machine Learning service that can do deep learning earlier this year. In China, the Alibaba public cloud has the DT PAI service available for AI workloads. There is the new Rekognition image recognition service -- presumably drawing on the talent and technology from deep learning startup Orbeus, whose team Amazon hired in the past year.

OZY and Giant Spoon are excited to partner on special live coverage from CES 2017 -- where the most forward-looking technology and media come together. Rather than cover just the latest gadgets, though, we're taking you deeper with key takeaways, little-known rising stars, unconventional trends and, yes, the coolest sh*t from the convention. Apparently, though, his affection is pre-programmed. Robots may be unfeeling servants, but they don't have to be cold and unblinking, says Lau. Which is why she's got her little one here and a fleet of other "unruly robot children" under her wing. Casual and calm during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Lau doesn't seem the type to play God.

Thousands of tech companies descended on Las Vegas for CES 2017 this week to show off what they think you'll buy in the coming year. Although we saw more of what dominated the tech scene last year -- smart home products, wearables and enough Amazon Echo partnerships to make your head spin -- some new products shined brightly above the rest. From an underwater drone to the car of the future, here's a look at what impressed us most. Toyota unveiled a concept car to highlight its vision for what cars may look like in 2030. With see-through glass doors, wheels built directly into the body and a bright white interior and exterior, the future is looking pretty sleek.

We expected to see artificial intelligence (AI), home and vehicle automation, smarter devices, augmented and virtual reality, and IoT to dominate at CES 2017. And truth be told it most certainly is not failing to deliver. In addition to new products in the usual consumer device categories like video game tech, TVs, and audio equipment we're seeing loads of the new trending technologies being showcased and it's clear that Christmas is not over at CES 2017. Everything from smart home bots, hacker-fighting routers and wallpaper TVs to super cool Lego Boost robotic kits that teach kids to code, is being shown off at the popular tech event making it super difficult to choose the coolest of them all. That said, here's a look at some of the top AI enabled tech and gadgets at CES 2017.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. FLASH Robotics has recently previewed its new EMYS robot head. The popping-out eyes are gone in this version, which aims to be more kid friendly, but it remains one of the weirdest looking and most expressive robot heads we've ever seen: This video is part of the DARS 2016 paper, "Programmable Self-Disassembly for Shape Formation in Large-Scale Robot Collectives," by Melvin Gauci, Radhika Nagpal, and Michael Rubenstein.

This is Essential Politics, our daily look at California political and government news. Rosey Grier, a legendary Los Angeles Rams player, says he's thinking about running for governor of California . Uber's effort to use self-driving cars on San Francisco streets without a permit inspires one legislator to take action . A former Los Angeles planning commissioner becomes the twelfth person to enter the race to replace Rep. Xavier Becerra. Rosey Grier, a legendary Los Angeles Rams player, says he's thinking about running for governor of California .

As part of my research on the year ahead, I embarked on a series, 20.17 Big Ideas for 2017, to ask a number of my favorite award-winning marketing experts, authors, and other thought leaders-- as well as some of Firebrand Group's own digital strategy and branding experts--to recommend one "Big Idea" that companies can take advantage of to get ahead in 2017. One of the individuals I was fortunate enough to interview for this series was Abby Whitmer, Director of Global Digital Marketing for Mary Kay. Whitmer, a longtime beauty insider, was added to the beauty giant to enhance its digital innovation, so it's no surprise that her big idea for 2017 involves Machine Learning. How are you using machine learning in your day to day? I'm trying to focus on how machine learning can be used now - as opposed to a very pie-in-the-sky, long-term way.

Why work in finance when you could be learning to replicate the brain? If you're a managing director at Goldman Sachs with a reasonable chance of making partner, why would you leave? Most people in finance would be intensely thrilled to get a sniff at a Goldman partnership. Unless, of course, something even better was on offer. For David Ha, former co-head of Japanese rates trading at Goldman Sachs, and a managing director at 32, the better alternative was a residency at Google Brain, Google's 12 month programme in California to jump-start careers in machine learning.

Watson AI is expected to improve productivity by 30%, Fukoku Mutual says. The company was encouraged by its use of similar IBM technology to analyze customer's voices during complaints. The software typically takes the customer's words, converts them to text, and analyzes whether those words are positive or negative. Similar sentiment analysis software is also being used by a range of US companies for customer service; incidentally, a large benefit of the software is understanding when customers get frustrated with automated systems.