Data is only getting bigger, but it is getting better at helping businesses, says Sally Percy. Today the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, but data growth will explode further as the internet of things expands. This is a challenge for businesses since – after people – data is arguably their most important asset. What they do with their data will increasingly make all the difference between failure and success. According to a study by research firm IDC, the big data technology and services market will be worth $58.9bn globally in 2020.

Well, I'd already seen Assassin's Creed, so I figured I might as well see the other sci-fi movie released this Christmas, Passengers, starring the they're-so-hot-right-now duo of Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Reviews were tepid, and I wasn't expecting much, but the film did manage to surprise me in one significant way. The marketing for Passengers has been all over the place. The film is either pitched as an action blockbuster, as Jim (Pratt) and Aurora (Lawrence) try to save a malfunctioning ship Sunshine-style, or a romance, where Pratt and Lawrence find love as the only two people accidentally awakened with 90 years left to go on an interstellar cruise. I imagined there would be some twist embedded in the film, but what I found when I watched it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

There is no doubt that 2016 has been a tumultuous year. From Brexit to Trump and the Ukraine to Syria, we have seen many upheavals on the geopolitical front. A lot has happened in Fintech, too, although here the upheaval has in my opinion been almost all positive. Today FinTech is firmly established as one of the biggest sectors in all technology. We can look forward to more tumult I think. If there is one overarching FinTech trend, I would say that several things that were only "potentials" in 2016 will become much more concrete.

REVOLVING DOOR -- "Trump appoints his business attorney to manage international negotiations," by CNN's Elise Labott and Teddy Schleifer: "Jason Greenblatt, the executive vice president and chief legal officer for Trump's business empire, will take on the title of special representative for international negotiations. A source familiar with the appointment told CNN that Greenblatt will primarily will be working on Israel-Palestinian peace process, the American relationship with Cuba and trade agreements."

French woman Lilly wants to marry her robot. Only her partner is 3D printed robot named Inmmovator who she designed herself, after realising she was attracted to "humanoid robots generally" rather than other people. "I'm really and totally happy," she told news.com.au "Our relationship will get better and better as technology evolves." The "proud robosexual" said she always loved the voices of robots as a child but realised at 19 she was sexually attracted to them as well.

The most interesting thing about Huawei's latest flagship, the Mate 9, is actually invisible to the naked eye. Under the hood, the phone uses machine learning to anticipate which apps you're going to use when, allowing for supposedly smoother performance. What the phone would have been like without this AI, we don't know, but we can say that the performance feels brisk throughout. If fluid day-to-day use seems like table stakes, you might also be impressed with the long battery life, bright display and the fact that it actually has a headphone jack. Unfortunately, what's otherwise a great phone stumbles with low-light photography, as well as some heavy-handed software tweaks that will turn off Android purists.

In the ninth episode of "Westworld," the HBO television series that imagines an escapist theme park populated by human players and fantasy-fulfulling androids, a character named Dolores questions the appeal of the world outside. If humans are so eager to flee into her reality, she asks, as sentience flickers into her circuitry, why would she ever want to visit theirs? In 2016, the year that facts, political decency, and a handful of our most cherished celebrities joined the choir invisible, who could argue with her? Now more than ever, fiction seems a place of retreat, and the interactive fictions of video games have an especially keen appeal. In times that feel out of control, the controller is a refuge. No matter how dark the world we enter, we are, like Westworld's clientele, made to feel invincible.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist has warned that the rise in robotics and automation could destroy millions of jobs across the world. Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on health, wealth, and inequality, told the Financial Times he believes robots are a much greater threat to employment in the US than globalisation. Addressing the theory that Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections was fueled by a backlash against globalisation, Deaton told the FT: "Globalisation for me seems to be not first-order harm and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result. I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are." He added: "It's hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook. But driverless cars are another matter entirely."

My daughter had been hounding me for days to mail Santa Claus her Christmas list, but I kept putting it off. Then this week, she had a change of heart and told me it's OK if we wait until the last minute, because "most of the toys are made by machines, and the elves just have to turn them on." Even a five year old, it seems, understands how modern manufacturing has changed, and her insight got me thinking about the future of elf jobs. With advances in automation and machine-learning, elf technology is getting really good. Engineers are focusing their efforts on designing "the machine that builds the machine," promising to spit out toys as fast as bubbles from a bubble machine.

This is the complete video of my keynote on the Digital Transformation of Business and Society; a futuristic view of impacts that the shift from labor to automation will have on businesses and society in general. Please note: audio-only versions of many videos are being made available here: http://gerd.fm/gerdaudiofeed My vimeo channel is here: https://vimeo.com/gerdfuturist Most of my books, presentations and slideshows are available via http://www.gerdcloud.com