The only thing that flies faster than time is the progress of technology. Once after lunch, a chip-designing friend excused himself quickly with the deft explanation that Moore's Law meant that he had to make his chip set 0.67 percent faster each week, even while on vacation. Now that 2017 is here, it's time to take stock of the technological changes ahead, if only to help you know where to place your bets in building programming skills for the future. From the increasing security headache of the internet of things to machine learning everywhere, the future of programming keeps getting harder to predict. There are naysayers who claim the chip companies have hit a wall.

It started as a seemingly sweet Twitter chatbot. Modeled after a millennial, it awakened on the internet from behind a pixelated image of a full-lipped young female with a wide and staring gaze. Microsoft, the multinational technology company that created the bot, named it Tay, assigned it a gender, and gave "her" account a tagline that promised, "The more you talk the smarter Tay gets!" She brimmed with enthusiasm: "can i just say that im stoked to meet u? humans are super cool." She asked innocent questions: "Why isn't #NationalPuppyDay everyday?" Tay's designers built her to be a creature of the web, reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and engage in human conversations and get better at it by interacting with people over social media. As the day went on, Tay gained followers. She also quickly fell prey to Twitter users targeting her vulnerabilities. For those internet antagonists looking to manipulate Tay, it didn't take much effort; they engaged the bot in ugly conversations, tricking the technology into mimicking their racist and sexist behavior.

These are the remembered phrases of George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," about a futuristic totalitarian state run by "Big Brother." It surged to the top of Amazon's best-seller list Wednesday–President Donald Trump's sixth day in office. According to CNN, Penguin has begun printing more copies of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" to meet the demand. The increase in sales appears to have started after Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway used the term "alternative facts" in an interview Sunday, which British historian and Orwell biographer Peter Stansky said was a phrase that "is very Orwellian, very'Newspeak.'" In "Nineteen Eighty-Four," "Newspeak" is the language of the state used to suppress thought. Stansky believes that the increase in sales of the novel, which Orwell wrote in 1949 as a warning to the Western world about the totalitarianism of his era, is a direct response to President Trump's efforts to manipulate facts during his first week in office.

Whether it's opening Google Maps for directions, shopping on Amazon, or watching movies on Netflix, 2016 was the year that bots truly hit mainstream. This seismic development -- which has critical implications for businesses, consumers, and, indeed, humankind -- is the result of three developments that came to a head in 2016: First, an unprecedented capacity to analyze data; second, a backlash (limited though it was) to protect what data can be analyzed; and third, a welcoming of automation into our lives that we couldn't have fathomed even a few years ago. At this moment, we have more data than ever before. We're creating information at a bewildering pace -- approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, which is enough to fill 57.5 billion iPads (at 32 gigabytes apiece). Big data is now a given, affecting every industry and function.

The regime in George Orwell's "1984" declared "War is Peace -- Freedom is Slavery -- Ignorance is Strength." The dystopian fiction drew flocks of book buyers after Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway's comment about "alternative facts." The publisher of George Orwell's novel "1984" has ordered a 75,000 copy reprint of the book after sales spiked earlier this week, CNN reports. "That is a substantial reprint," a spokesman for Penguin told CNN, "and larger than our typical reprint for '1984.'" The novel, which was the No. 1 bestselling book on Amazon as of Wednesday morning, was referenced by many in the press after comments made by Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway.

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SoftBank Chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son (C), Foxconn Chairman and CEO, Terry Gou (R), and Alibaba Group Executive Chairman Jack Ma (L) pose with Pepper, the world's first personal robot that can read emotions in 2015. When billionaire Terry Gou acknowledged eyeing a $7 billion U.S. investment at his New Year's press meeting in Taiwan, it solidified his role as the Third Musketeer in East Asia's emerging involvement in Donald Trump's "America First" push. Gou is the founder chairman of Foxconn Technology (aka Hon Hai Precision Industry), the biggest supplier of Apple iPhones and iPads as well as other brand-name devices. Foxconn does most of its assembly in mainland China. So when the 66-year-old Gou said talks had started on a display-screen plant that could create 30,000-50,000 U.S. jobs, his aims fell into place with earlier pronouncements by Asian tech tycoons Masayoshi Son and Jack Ma as they paid visits to Trump Tower after the new president's election.

President Donald Trump is widely expected to sign his latest executive order Wednesday seriously restricting immigration and refugees from seven countries in the Middle East and Africa, five of which the U.S. bombed under the previous administration. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump accused President Barack Obama of supporting liberal immigration and refugee policies that the Republican billionaire-turned-politician said threatened national security. Trump directed his anti-immigration rhetoric toward Mexico and the Middle East, particularly singling Muslims as targets for tough, new visa policies. While he at one time suggested implementing a ban on all Muslims, Trump has since said he would focus on several countries whose population he felt presented the greatest risk. The list of countries was confirmed by congressional aides and immigration experts who the new administration had briefed on the upcoming order, according to Reuters.

Cyber security is a major challenge in today's world, as government agencies, corporations and individuals have increasingly become victims of cyber attacks that are so rapidly finding new ways to threaten the Internet that it's hard for good guys to keep up with them.

Every step forward in artificial intelligence (AI) challenges assumptions about what machines can do. Myriad opportunities for economic benefit have created a stable flow of investment into AI research and development, but with the opportunities come risks to decision-making, security and governance. Increasingly intelligent systems supplanting both blue- and white-collar employees are exposing the fault lines in our economic and social systems and requiring policy-makers to look for measures that will build resilience to the impact of automation. Leading entrepreneurs and scientists are also concerned about how to engineer intelligent systems as these systems begin implicitly taking on social obligations and responsibilities, and several of them penned an Open Letter on Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence in late 2015.1 Whether or not we are comfortable with AI may already be moot: more pertinent questions might be whether we can and ought to build trust in systems that can make decisions beyond human oversight that may have irreversible consequences. By providing new information and improving decision-making through data-driven strategies, AI could potentially help to solve some of the complex global challenges of the 21st century, from climate change and resource utilization to the impact of population growth and healthcare issues.