If 2016 seemed politically tumultuous, 2017 promises to be equally tumultuous on the technology front. The pace of change is accelerating at a dizzying rate, with profound implications for the way we work, play and communicate. So what are the big technology trends to watch out for in 2017? Cybersecurity will undoubtedly be the dominant theme of 2017, as all tech innovations could be undermined by data thefts, fraud and cyber propaganda. Forget Kim Kardashian, it's hacking that could break the internet - and much more besides.

When did electricity take over from steam in the UK? When did football replace cricket as the most popular sport? And what year did women start to become more frequently mentioned in the press? Specifically, a new paper by a team artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Bristol that used AIto analyse the news from 100 different British regional newspapers over the past 150 years. The team of academics, led by professor Nello Cristianini, collaborated closely with the company findmypast, which is digitising historical newspapers from the British Library as part of their British Newspaper Archive project.

Popular visions of artificial intelligence often focus on robots and the dystopian future they will create for humanity, but to understand the true impact of AI, its skeptics and detractors should look at the future of cybersecurity. The reason is simple: If we have any hope of winning the war on cybercrime, we have no choice but to rely on AI to supplement our human skills and experience. With the number and sophistication of cybercriminals continuing to grow, the technology industry has started to address this challenge through the use of AI. As with many new technologies, however, the good that AI can do is threatened by the misconceptions and hyperbole that surround it. For this reason, the technology industry must address these popular perceptions, and that starts with redefining AI as what it truly is: augmented intelligence.

President-elect Trump has met with leaders in technology in an effort to open lines of communication and discuss business after months of two-way criticism. It's no secret that Silicon Valley was largely in support of Hillary Clinton, who had aligned herself with the technology community, while over the last few years Mr. Trump has criticized Apple's iPhones, accused Facebook, Google, and Twitter of burying negative news about Democrats, and picked a fight with Jeff Bezos on Twitter insinuating his purchase of the Washington Post was for political influence to help Amazon's business. While this meeting simply serves to smooth over relations with the technology community, there is a longer conversation needed with President-elect Trump, who's presidency sits at a tipping point in technology. In the next four years we will see an explosion of AI technology that further delivers on the promise of driverless cars, intelligent robots, and other societal and job-impacting advancements. The conversation needed is how to, or more precisely, how not to regulate AI.

This is Essential Politics, our daily look at California political and government news. Rosey Grier, a legendary Los Angeles Rams player, says he's thinking about running for governor of California . Uber's effort to use self-driving cars on San Francisco streets without a permit inspires one legislator to take action . A former Los Angeles planning commissioner becomes the twelfth person to enter the race to replace Rep. Xavier Becerra. Rosey Grier, a legendary Los Angeles Rams player, says he's thinking about running for governor of California .

An asteroid as big as a 10-story building has passed by Earth at a distance half that of the Moon, researchers have revealed. The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was only spotted only Saturday by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey. It is between 50 and 111 feet (15 to 34 meters) long, and when it passed by Earth, 2017 AG3 was moving at 9.9 miles per second (16 kilometers per second). Here, it is so close to Earth its text is almost unreadable. According to an asteroid-impact simulator called'Impact Earth!' by Purdue University, if a porous rock asteroid of 111 feet (34 meters) long hit Earth at a 45-degree angle, the simulator found, it would have exploded as an air burst.

Software can now predict when people are most likely to try new things. Scientists analyzed purchasing data from over 280,000 shoppers and found that the more people purchase a product, the more likely they are to stick with it. However, it also found those who have recently switched brands are twice as likely to try a new one. Scientists analyzed purchasing data from over 280,000 shoppers and found that the more people purchase a product, the more likely they are to continue to do so. Researchers at the University of London designed an AI to predict when people are most likely to try new things - such as switching from one product to another.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

The odds are high, according to recent economic analyses. Indeed, fully 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be automated "in a decade or two," as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have predicted. That's because artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be automated. Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon's huge shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and writing sports stories for newspapers. Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the wheel at all. Meanwhile, Uber's "Otto" program is installing AI in 16-wheeler trucks--a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers, an enormous employment category.

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.