In 10 years, we'll see big changes in how people live their lives and how companies operate, thanks to the innovation that's now being kindled around the world. So says Alec Ross, former innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton during her term as U.S. Secretary of State, who lays out the thesis in his new book, The Industries of the Future. In Part 1 of our interview, Ross explains how the technology underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, blockchain technology, will greatly reduce the friction in financial and other transactions. Here he discusses the impact of cognitive robots and the outlook for U.S. companies trying to compete on a global scale. You talked about robotics a lot in your book and you focused for the most part on physical robots.

A sequel about married paranormal investigators, "The Conjuring 2," ascended to the top of the Friday box office, outperforming runners-up "Warcraft" and "Now You See Me 2." The three debuts supplanted last week's box-office leader "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows," which landed in the fourth spot, followed by the Warner Bros. romance "Me Before You." "The Conjuring 2" earned an estimated 16.4 million overnight. The New Line/Warner Bros. film exceeded expectations while on its way to a projected 40 million opening weekend. Though hardly a disappointment, the sequel has a steep climb to reach the tally of its predecessor, which ultimately earned nearly 320 million worldwide. Audiences liked the movie, which stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as believers working to exorcise demons from a home in North London. Like its predecessor, the second installment earned an A- from the polling firm CinemaScore.

It's no mystery that big data presents a challenge to privacy. But perhaps more alarming is the emergence of technology that combines facial recognition and data analytics to create a powerful surveillance tool. It's a disturbing development that combines the most worrisome aspects of algorithmic and big data technology with the chilling and dangerous threats inherent in facial recognition. A Chicago tech company is advertising its "predictive video" to anticipate behavior "based on the emotional state and personality style of any person in a video." In Russia, the app FindFace gives users "the power to identify total strangers on the street," according to The Atlantic. Google's new chat app Allo has a "smart reply" feature that apparently analyzes photos from contacts and offers suggested responses to them .

Recently a drone filmed a pair of whales feeding for perhaps the first time. Bryde's whales (named after the Norwegian merchant who built the first whaling stations in South Africa) reach a maximum length of over 54 feet. That's humongous, and should make it easy to observe them. The vastness of the ocean disagrees, and happily hides the whales in their vast tropical water range. Until recently, Bryde's whales had rarely been observed feeding in the wild.

A self-driving John Deere tractor rumbles through Ian Pigott's 2,000-acre farm every week or so to spray fertilizer, guided by satellite imagery and each plot's harvesting history. The 11-ton behemoth, loaded with so many screens it looks like an airplane cockpit, relays the nutrient information to the farmer's computer system. With weather forecasts and data on pesticide use, soil readings, and plant tissue tests pulled by various pieces of software, Pigott can keep tabs on the farm down to the square meter in real time without ever leaving his carpeted office. "This is becoming more standard," says Pigott, who grows a rotation of wheat, oilseed, oats, and barley on his farm in the rolling Hertfordshire countryside an hour north of London. German chemical company Bayer cited the growth in such digitally assisted farming as a key reason for its 62 billion bid for Monsanto, which has become a leading provider of analytics used by growers.

Months after Susan Tully and friends bought a pair of professional video game teams for an estimated 1 million, her four-man "Call of Duty" squad finished its season in 11th out of 12 places. There, exposure and sponsor interest would dissolve. The distress Tully felt as she spent an April afternoon in a small, dark Burbank video studio watching her team attempt to avoid demotion was not the emotion she banked on when she put her money into the burgeoning industry. But upheaval is becoming something of a routine for the investors fueling pro video gaming's rapid rise. China's richest man, Russia's richest man, the U.S.'s fourth-richest man and a string of American multimillionaires all have ties to teams now.

It all began from a research project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted by a group of scientists from the electric and computer engineering department. In collaboration with the British University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, they have created a mini origami-robot. Obviously, this invention has nothing to do with paper. The name should evoke its ability to bend and unfold. In fact, this tiny technological invention owes its success exactly to this ability to shrink, turn in on itself and fit into a digestible casing and be swallowed.

The Science Council of Japan, the nation's largest and most powerful group of scientists, has launched a panel to discuss whether the group should drop its long-standing vow that scientists will not take part in defense-related research. That policy is an important principle that Japan's scientists have upheld for decades in view of the history of academic institutions cooperating with the military during the nation's past wars and the massive damage the wars brought to the people of Japan and other countries. The group should not tinker with the principle. Doing so would lead to a change in the basic nature of scientific research in this country. The SCJ decided last month to set up the 15-member panel following heated discussions at a plenary meeting.

The Viacom saga continues: National Amusements, the holding company through which Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, is looking for new Viacom board members. This isn't a shocker--speculation of a board shake-up began after George Abrams and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman were removed from National Amusements' board a few weeks ago. On the list of potential board replacements, reports the Wall Street Journal, are former Time Warner exec Kenneth Lerer, ex-Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and former Discovery Communications CEO Judith McHale. Don't mess with Texas (drivers): Former Lyft and Uber drivers in Austin, TX say Uber and Lyft broke federal law when they abruptly stopped operations in the city. Drivers filed a suit in San Francisco (where the companies are based) saying the two ride-sharing services violated a law stating they needed to give sixty days' notice to employees before a'mass layoff'.

Microsoft has released the newest version of its Security Intelligence Report which analyzes the threat landscape of exploits and vulnerabilities the industry faced in the second half of 2015. For the very first time the report, now in its tenth year, includes security data from the Microsoft cloud. "We're pretty excited about this volume because it's the first one we've ever released with data from our cloud services and there are a lot of customers including CISOs and CIOs that are interested in the data we have from our cloud," Tim Rains, chief security advisor at Microsoft, told Infosecurity. By implementing their machine learning system capable of processing ten terabytes of data every day, the firm has been able to leverage its widespread cloud data to create an extensive, intelligent security graph to help protect its customers. "The intelligent security graph is our attempt to collect trillions of signals from billions of data sources so that we can triangulate what the bad guys are doing and where they're at. The graph allows us to put a great deal of data together, analyze it and make changes to our security posture," Rains said.