Designers will succeed programmers as the kings of Silicon Valley, machines will become as smart as humans, and ambient computing will supplant smartphones in the next few years. Those are three of the top 10 trends coming in technology, according to five venture capitalists who made their predictions Wednesday night at a local Silicon Valley institution. The Top 10 Tech Trends event has been held annually for the past 18 years by the Churchill Club, which hosts forums with tech's top executives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers. The criteria for the trends are that they must not be obvious and that they will take off within five years, though both rules are frequently broken. Few of the predictions directly involved traditional enterprise computing, which customarily is focused on the nearer-term trends, but virtually all of them are enabled by heavyweight enterprise technologies.

The Dogo from General Robotics is a portable, tactical combat robot. The big difference is that the Dogo is armed with a 9mm Glock pistol. Dogo weighs 26 pounds and can to climb stairs and other obstacles. It trundles along at 2.5 miles an hour for at least two hours on one battery charge. The operator gets a 360-degree view of the surroundings via six video cameras, while another two cameras are sighted along the pistol barrel.

Earlier this year, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan predicted that artificial intelligence in healthcare will see a "dramatic market expansion" in the next couple of years, with the potential to reduce the cost of medical treatments by half across the board. "By 2025, AI systems could be involved in everything from population health management, to digital avatars capable of answering specific patient queries," said Harpreet Singh Buttar, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan. With this in mind, we identified companies that are already applying machine learning techniques and predictive analytics to reduce drug discovery times, provide virtual assistance to patients, and diagnose ailments by processing medical images, among other things. We published the market map below in April 2016 and updated it on 5/24/2016, adding over 35 companies to it and removing ones that exited, like MetaMind, which was recently acquired by Salesforce. The startups below have raised more than 870M in aggregate funding since 2011.

Meet Ivan the Terminator - Russia's robotic answer to Iron Man that could be about to change military warfare forever. The terrifying new robot soldier is the latest in the country's list of high-tech weaponry as it competes with the US and China in the artificial intelligence stakes. According to Russian newspaper Komosomolskaya Pravd, the droid is designed "to replace the person in the battle or in emergency areas where there is a risk of explosion, fire, high background radiation, or other conditions harmful to humans. "The development of a special military robot is one of the priorities of military construction in Russia." The Iron Man machines are remotely controlled, but there are fears that they could become completely autonomous in the future.

Creating mood sensing technology has become very popular in recent years. There is a wide range of companies trying to detect your emotions from what you write, the tone of your voice, or from the expressions on your face. All of these companies offer their technology online through cloud-based programming interfaces (APIs). As part of my offline emotion sensing hardware (Project Jammin), I have already built early prototypes of facial expression and speech content recognition for emotion detection. In this short article I describe the missing part, a voice tone analyzer.

Advanced digital technologies are swiftly changing the kinds of skills that jobs require. How are improvements in digital technology changing the nature of human work? A team of researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Masdar Institute in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, have taken a close look at that question. In a paper called "Racing With and Against the Machine: Changes in Occupational Skill Composition in an Era of Rapid Technological Advance," Frank MacCrory, George Westerman and Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School and Yousef Alhammadi of the Masdar Institute studied the U.S. government's O*NET database of occupational skill requirements in 2006 and 2014 and analyzed the types of skills that jobs required in both years. Their paper was named the best conference paper at the 2014 International Conference on Information Systems.

The first wave of robots taking over human jobs is upon us. Apple Inc. AAPL, 0.79% supplier Foxconn Technology Co. 2354, 0.14% has replaced 60,000 human workers with robots in a single factory, according to a report in the South China Morning Post, initially published over the weekend. This is part of a massive reduction in headcount across the entire Kunshan region in China's Jiangsu province, in which many Taiwanese manufacturers base their Chinese operations. In a statement to MarketWatch, Foxconn Technology Group confirmed that it has been automating its manufacturing facilities throughout China, including Kunshan, for "many years," which it says has freed up its employees to focus on higher value-added elements of the manufacturing process, such as research and development, process control and quality control. "Across all of our facilities today, we are applying robotics engineering and other innovative manufacturing technologies to replace repetitive tasks previously done by employees," Foxconn said.

In the quest for the most capable robotic bug (which is a quest that many roboticists seem to be on, because robotic bugs are nifty), some of the most exciting designs are inspired by the dynamic, multi-modal ways in which insects are conquering the world. Combining skills like running with skills like jumping can make little robots much more efficient movers, allowing them to go farther on a charge as well as helping them surmount obstacles and rough terrain. Most of the small jumping robots we've seen before use a spring mechanism with a latch on it. The latch makes the spring state binary: the spring gets all wound up, the latch holds it, and then disengages on command, releasing all of the energy in the spring in one go. You can get a lot of power this way, but it's an all or nothing sort of thing, so the magnitude (height, distance, whatever) isn't controllable.

China's artificial intelligence industry received a huge boost of validation from the government on Wednesday, which announced its plans to create a "100 billion level" ( 15 billion USD) artificial intelligence market by 2018. According to state-owned media Xinhua News Agency, the government plans to roll out projects in smart home applications, smart cars, unmanned systems, wearables, and robotics over the next three years. "According to the plan, China will improve the country's economy and society, disrupt the core technologies of artificial intelligence, and increase our smart hardware supply capabilities," stated the government in its announcement. "Over the next three years, the country will build a solid foundation for an innovative, active, collaborative, eco-friendly, and safe artificial intelligence industry." As per usual, the government's announcement was vague.

Anyone who has had a bad night's sleep will know that the impact it can have on your ability to think clearly and remember things the following day. But it appears that we may be able to improve our retrieval of memories, by simulating how our brains work during sleep. New research has discovered the brain circuit that controls how certain memories are consolidated in the brain overnight. Researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have now shown how manipulating a specific brain circuit can prevent or enhance the memories you retain. Masanori Murayama, who led the study, said: 'Our findings on sleep deprivation are particularly interesting from a clinical perspective.