At the start of a new year, what is there to look forward to? According to predictions from think tanks and tech experts, advances in automation and artificial intelligence will threaten the jobs of millions of workers. The CEO of one company, Capgemini, goes further, predicting that AI will be one of the key factors dividing society into the haves and have-nots, with highly skilled engineers at the one end of the spectrum and low-paid unqualified worker drones at the other, with nothing in between. There will be massive redundancies, for sure. Is it time to rethink the welfare system and pay everyone a minimum living wage whether they work or not?

Absolutely, says Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. His team is using artificial intelligence to grow basil and other produce in enclosed climate-controlled environments, and, thanks to hundreds of sensors, crunching data to come up with "recipes" for growing the tastiest, most nutritious crops on the planet. Harper is not alone in using AI to revolutionize the future of food. Scientists, chefs, agronomists and techies are collecting vast catalogs of data around everything from food flavors and aromas to growing climates and plant biochemistry and creating algorithms for tastier, healthier, safer and more sustainable food. While chefs look at recipes for ingredients, artificial intelligence looks at the chemical composition of an ingredient to suggest combinations--creating new recipes based on the ingredient. Food pairing, for example, uses algorithms to help professional chefs come up with unexpected ingredient matches based on what foods and drinks go well together.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Few moments in life are more humiliating than showing off your new voice-assistant toy to family. Only for it to miss-hear, not understand or play Bonjovi when you ask what the weather's like today. I'm sure, given how well Alexa appears to have sold this Christmas, others have been through a similar ordeal.

This is the first of a multi-part series explaining the fundamentals of deep learning by long-time tech journalist Michael Copeland. Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to.

Sami Haddadin once attached a knife to a robot manipulator and programmed it to impale his arm. He was demonstrating how a new force-sensing control scheme he designed was able to detect the contact and instantly stop the robot, as it did. Now Haddadin wants to make that same kind of safety feature, which has long been limited to highly sophisticated and expensive systems, affordable to anyone using robots around people. Sometime in 2017, his Munich-based startup, Franka Emika, will start shipping a rather remarkable robotic arm. It's designed to be easy to set up and program, which is nice.

While merrily chirping, dancing and posing for selfies, a robot named Pepper looks like another expensive toy at a San Francisco mall. But don't dismiss it as mere child's play. Pepper embodies the ambitions of SoftBank Robotics, an Asian joint venture formed by a trio of major technology companies that's aiming to put its personable robots in businesses and homes across the U.S. over the next few years. If the technology advances as Softbank Robotics hopes, Pepper could become a playmate, companion and concierge. It could eventually respond to voice commands to retrieve vital information, make reservations and control home appliances that are connected to the internet.

A bereaved family is suing Apple after the death of their young daughter, who died in a car crash allegedly caused by a driver who was using FaceTime behind the wheel. The family said the tech giant should have implemented software it patented in 2008 which would have prevented the app being used by a driver. Five-year-old Moriah Modisette was travelling in the back of her parent's car near Dallas in 2014 when it was hit at 65 mph by Garrett Willhelm, 22, who was using the Apple app while driving, police said. She later died of her injuries and her parents, James and Bethany Modisette, and sister, Isabella, eight, were also hurt. Officers at the scene found the FaceTime app still running after the crash.

It started out in your phone. You would ask Siri to tell you the weather report or a silly joke. But artificial intelligence and digital assistants are no laughing matter: They are likely the way most Americans will experience the Internet of Things (IoT) explosion, and are finally a cheap and easy way for mere mortals to automate their homes as only the wealthy once could. Last year Amazon brought its AI Alexa to homes, but next year it's going to be in your home. Cheap and affordable voice-controlled artificial intelligences like Amazon's Alexa and Google's Home are going to be everywhere, and you'll see that in spades at CES. You'll hear from companies like Neura that "enhance products with AI." You'll read about it when you hear about Ara by Kolibree, the world's first toothbrush with embedded AI. (My brain hurts thinking about that.)

While Amazon only just recently started delivering to real customers via drone, it has even bigger ideas. A patent filing reveals a system where they take off from floating blimps stocked with commonly requested products. The adult industry and CES have a longer relationship than you might know. From 1984 to 1998 porn was a part of CES, until AVN split off for its own concurrently running show. Now, the two expos take place weeks apart, and porn has almost no presence at the electronics show.

Testosterone has long been associated with aggression and competition in men. But the versatile sex hormone can also impact a range of emotional states including empathy, generosity, of corruption, and risk taking. Experts speculate that there may be more to the hormone than first thought, and that testosterone could be just as useful for cooperation as competition. Testosterone has long been associated with aggression and competition in men. It seems that for every question scientists answer on testosterone, more are raised in its place.