In a year of uncertainty and unpredictability, change strangely remained our only constant in 2016. Against a backdrop of unexpected political events – the outcome of the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump and the Italy constitutional reform vote, for example – and an unsettled global economy, technological innovation has been developing at a dizzying pace. Nowhere has this been more notable than in the retail sector. Customer demand for convenience is driving change. Our Unfaithful Consumer research found that 55 percent of consumers see it as the most important factor when it comes to deciding where, and how, to shop. With the help of truly disruptive new technology, the focus in 2016 was on making the entire shopping experience more convenient for the consumer.

Billionaires in the world's tech capital Silicon Valley are reportedly preparing for the apocalypse by buying underground bunkers, guns, ammo and motorcycles. Fearful that artificial intelligence will displace so many jobs that there will be a revolt against those responsible for the technology, the are entrepreneurs readying themselves for doomsday like scenarios. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of the professional social network, LinkedIn, told The New Yorker that he believes more than 50 per cent of billionaires in the Californian tech hub are preparing for the worst. "I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time," he said.

Japan should tap the potential of young workers and encourage more people in their 30s and 40s to become chief executive officers, as part of a reform to revitalize the economy toward 2030, a government task force said Wednesday. Amid the graying of its society, Japan also needs to step up support for people with dementia and work to eradicate car accidents involving the elderly by making use of an automatic braking and self-driving system. The task force outlined a series of steps that Japan needs to take in the years ahead, as the average age of the country's baby boomers will reach 80 around 2030. The report was presented to a meeting of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The task force involves academics and members of the council, including Sadayuki Sakakibara, chairman of the Japan Business Federation, the country's largest business lobby known as Keidanren.

It has long been claimed that women are better at multi-tasking than men. While some women relish the accolade, others suspect some males use it as an excuse for avoiding work. Now scientists have found strong proof that men are inferior at juggling two activities - at least compared to women under 60. Men asked to carry out complex thinking while walking on a treadmill without handrails were found to stop swinging their right arm while they walk. But women under 60 – described as'pre-menopausal' – were'surprisingly' not affected with both arms swung freely as before.

Security remains one of the top unresolved challenges for businesses. Billions of dollars have been spent on security technology over the last 30 years, yet hackers seem to be more successful than ever. Every organization is now under extreme threat, all the time. Today, hacking is a much more complex art than it used to be: It no longer only involves just scanning and penetrating the network via a vulnerability. Yet the traditional security tools used by most companies are often inadequate because they still focus on this, ignoring what is now a very complex post-compromise chain of events.

Automation in the workplace has been one of the looming existential threats to American workers for years now. And with each new study published, the fear of robots, machines, and artificial intelligence coming to take our jobs ticks higher. But a new report from McKinsey finds that the future of work and automation isn't quite the zero-sum game when it comes to jobs as some perceive. Right now, 51% of job activities could be automated with "currently demonstrated" technology, the McKinsey report says. The distinction is noteworthy: McKinsey isn't saying half of all jobs can be automated with existing technology, but rather job tasks.

This story originally appeared on VentureBeat on December 27, 2016 and was written by Hira Saeed. Artificial intelligence may be the hot trend of 2016, but the term itself opens up a debate. Some praise AI, while others believe reliance on AI is fraught with danger. Others worry about the demise of humans at the hands of our AI masters. Yet whether it is the Internet of Things or health care, AI is only beginning to have an effect.

Irrespective of your ideological viewpoint, the collective Women's marches around the world this past weekend were inspiring and illustrative of the collective power of women. Simultaneously, regions of the United States were being ravaged by deadly tornadic storms. Modern computer models were critical in identifying the evolution of atmospheric conditions to support severe weather. There is a curious connection between these two trains of thought. Trust me, I am about to make the connection.

With China making rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI)-based research, it is imperative that India view AI as a critical element of its national security strategy, recommends an August 2016 report titled India and the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Thanks to the increasingly digital economy, fuelled by improving education and globalization, the Indian consumer is unknowingly the country's biggest beneficiary of recent advances in AI, notes the report. From utilizing various applications powered by AI to using a range of online services such as Amazon Marketplace and Netflix that learn from consumers' online behaviour to make intelligent product and service recommendations, consumers are readily engaged with the proliferation of AI in India, whether they appreciate it or not. Indian academics, public researchers, labs, and entrepreneurs face a different challenge than the corporations that dominate the space--the infrastructure necessary for an AI revolution in India has been neglected by policymakers. While lack of physical infrastructure is certainly a major impediment, India's AI development also suffers from the paucity of the necessary cultural infrastructure, which is key for recent advances from lab to marketplace in AI.

The Trump administration's controversial attempt to declare its recent presidential inauguration as having "the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period," has inadvertently highlighted the fact that counting crowds remains a painstaking and inexact science. But the rise of artificial intelligence could soon spare crowd scientists the task of manually counting heads. An early glimpse of how artificial intelligence (AI) could help count crowds appeared in 2013. University of Central Florida researchers showed how computer software based on machine learning can swiftly provide automated headcount estimates for crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Such AI tools still have room for improvement in terms of achieving accurate headcounts based on images.