Remember the sci-fi movie Johnny Mnemonic, made more than two decades ago? Specifically that quirky scene depicting Keanu Reeves wrapped in a VR suite, using hand gestures to navigate the "future internet"? A decade after that, Minority Report envisioned a scenario where augmented "stuff" would enrich the reality we actually live in. I cannot remember a movie that puts more focus on the "augmented user experience". In countless scenes, we are compelled to imagine a future where this additional layer of reality becomes a natural part of the mundane.

Heading into last night's season finale of "Westworld," the show's android hosts were poised to finally, as our President-elect might put it, throw off their shackles: Maeve was plotting an escape into the human world, and Dolores was moving closer to the core of her own memories and identity. Among the guests, the cold-blooded Man in Black approached the center of the mysterious maze, an achievement that he hoped might herald an upending of the park's unnatural order. In fleeing their engineered lives and games, though, none of the show's androids--nor, indeed, any of the humans--ended up making it out of the park's walls. Instead, the robots staged their liberation from within, and--thanks to an eleventh-hour flourish by Ford--arose to dominate Westworld, not to defy it. Throughout the show's first season, Maeve, with her penetrating and cool violence, often seemed closer to liberation than Dolores, who was always this close to breaking down.

Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.

A.I (artificial intelligence) seems to be everywhere nowadays, from Hollywood movies, to regular news stories to thought-provoking features. The debate over just how far A.I will progress, and the related moral ramifications, rages on. But what's certain is that, right now, A.I is making consumers' lives easier by the day. This is happening not just through the development work of big tech companies, but also through the creativity of tech startups. The startup industry is booming around the world, with a staggering 50 million new startups being formed each year. An increasing number of these are exploring the possibilities of A.I, and working out how to bring new technology to the masses. We've delved into this exhilarating world to bring you 25 of the most interesting A.I startups worth keeping an eye on in 2017.

Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.

Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) of "Westworld" met a surprising end during the season finale of the sci-fi show. After launching the new narrative he painstakingly created -- even at the cost of several lives -- Ford seemingly allowed Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) to kill him the same way his former partner, Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright), asked her to end him many years ago. When Entertainment Weekly asked Hopkins what drove Ford to do so, he said he has no clue. He's obviously a very proud man fascinated by human intelligence, the nature of intelligence, the history of the human being, the nature of consciousness, and the theory that human consciousness – as we know it today – started very recently," he said. Hopkins loves that his character has a cryptic morality, and he believes it's part of his overall allure. "He wants to create a pure dystopia or utopia, but he begins to realize somewhere in there that he's lost track of it.

When Amazon first coined the strapline "Ask Alexa" for its virtual assistant, it couldn't have predicted the X-rated nature of some of the requests. "She" may boast an encyclopaedic knowledge, but research by consumer behaviour analysts Canvas 8 reveals that some users are more interested in a virtual hook-up than fact finding. And she's not the only target: the equally smooth voice of Microsoft's Cortana is getting customers just as hot under the collar apparently. From perma-smiling avatars in traditionally female support roles, to hyper-sexualised "fembots" pandering to male fantasies, the female form is everywhere in techno-world - attractive, servile and at your command. A little more conservative, but just as eager to please, is virtual personal assistant Amy Ingram, the brainchild of New York start-up X.ai.

The pizzeria vowed on Monday to stay open despite a shooting incident sparked by a fake news report that it was fronting a child sex ring run by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. On Sunday afternoon, a 28-year-old man walked into a Washington, D.C. ping-pong bar and pizzeria. He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle – hardly standard-issue hardware for a round of table tennis. He fired one or more shots, as people fled Comet Ping Pong, before surrendering to police officers. Edgar Maddison Welch told police he had traveled from his home in Salisbury, N.C. to the nation's capital to investigate a pre-election conspiracy theory, wherein Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton allegedly led a child-trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong.