To hear Alphabet tell it, an artificial–intelligence-first future will one day surround us.

After all, the whole point of artificial intelligence is to make our gelatinous brains unnecessary. Those brains cost money to maintain, and that's not helpful for revenue multiples. But even mundane tasks, such as booking a hotel room, are difficult problems to accomplish with algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence is the fourth industrial revolution after the invention of steam power, electricity, electronics and software. And Bottos will be the key driving force for this revolution as the data becomes the core competitive power in AI development.

A galaxy far, far away is a little closer with the invention of a robotic arm inspired by Luke Skywalker's bionic hand. And while this arm may not wield a lightsaber, it has a greater power for jazz musician Jason Barnes -- it lets him play the piano for the first time in five years. Barnes, who lost much of his right arm in a work accident, is back at the keys with an AI prosthesis created by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Unlike most prosthetics, it gives the 28-year-old the ability to control each finger individually. With it, Barnes can play Beethoven.

Amazon will hold its second annual Digital Day sale on Friday Dec. 29, in which it will offer deals on games, apps, movies and music. The Digital Day sale will follow Amazon's successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as the company's record-breaking holiday season. Digital Day will offer more than 5,000 deals across the shopping platform. This year around, the company is holding 40 percent more deals than in 2016, Amazon said. The online retailer will offer up to 80 percent off digital content, which includes apps, games, TV shows, movies, digital comics and more.

A few months ago I stumbled onto an interesting idea while listening to the TWiML & AI podcast. It described a process by which one could attempt to introduce confusion into a network (starting at any arbitrary hidden layer) so that it couldn't learn from select biases in the training data. For example, if you were training an image classification network, and you wanted to forbid the network to learn anything about race, you could use this technique, to do so. The problem is that I can't for the life of me remember what this technique is called, or what episode of the podcast it was discussed in. All that I remember is that I believe that the method proposed involved choosing a layer beyond which you didn't want the network to be able to include information about the bias you were trying to remove (the layer becomes a filter of sorts), and using that layer as input to a second neural network that was optimizing a confusion loss.

Explore and capture the night sky from the palm of your hand--Tiny1 is powerful enough to image deep sky objects but compact enough to fit in your pocket. The camera has a searchable augmented reality map that guides you to and identifies stars and constellations, and it connects with your smartphone to share photos and videos directly to social media. Tiny1 is available for preorder at US$479; delivery is expected December 2017. How do you think AI will most substantially benefit humankind in the future? It seems no opinion holds a majority, but many respondents anticipated advancements in science and medicine.

Science-fiction film costume designers create sartorial future worlds and, if they get it right, can influence current trends along the way. Here, we ask a few forward-looking costume designers to describe their favorite piece from each of their current films and, interestingly, the choices were anything but outrageously fantastical -- they ranged from the lovely and nostalgic to the manly and the fussy. Luis Sequeira's favorite costume is Elisa's (Sally Hawkins) enchanting dream-sequence dress. Set against the film's lush, dark, moody world of the early '60s, the black-and-white dream sequence "is pure light and love," says Sequeira. "It was amazing to create something so opposite to the rest of the film."

The year 2017 saw artificial intelligence bringing the stuff of science fiction closer to reality by not only gaining a foothold in all spheres of life but also getting the better of humans in many fields.

NASA is already planning a mission in 2069, we watch an iPhone X camouflage your face, and combine sex, robots and popular culture. Hype matters more than quality.Will Smith's'Bright' is terrible, but that doesn't matter to Netflix Despite a low Rotten Tomatoes review score (32 percent), Bright could still be the algorithmically-created hit Netflix is seeking. If you have a TV, you can explore most of the issues yourself.You don't need a Ph.D. to grasp the anxieties around sex robots Many of the preoccupations that were on display at the third International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots are ones previously explored in pop culture. From Futurama to Westworld, going back to Weird Science and The Stepford Wives, the questions that academics are currently pondering have already been played out, fictionally at least, on TV. To spare you a lot of very dry reading, we offer this guide on what you should be watching.