I watched the movie Black Panther this past week, and it was the first time in a movie when I had a hard time deciphering what was real and not real. The ships looked ultra-realistic, the costumes so convincing and utterly detailed that you almost think you could buy one at Nordstrom on sale this weekend. One of the most digitally detailed and colorful movies ever made, it's also a warning about the future. Not knowing when something is actually just a robot. This was not the case just a year or two ago.

Once large law firms had armies of first-year law graduates, combing documents for relevant information; now machines largely do it. New artificial intelligence diagnosed lung cancer 50 percent more accurately than radiology experts last year. And the U.S. Postal Service plans to deploy autonomous trucks by 2025. These are signs of big change, precipitated by a wave of new artificial intelligence resulting from a perfect storm of investments and development these past five years. And coming developments will increasingly enable machines to do more mental and physical tasks faster, better and cheaper than humans.

If you're a music fan, the first wave of smart speakers was probably a disappointment. While Alexa and Google Assistant have definitively proven they have a place in the home, the first Echo and Google Home devices were unimpressive when it came to actually playing music. They did the job in a pinch, and being able to command Spotify with your voice is a killer feature, but many longed for better-quality audio. Fortunately, that call has been answered. In the past six months, Sonos, Google and Apple have all released music-first speakers with voice assistants built in. If you value audio quality above all else (and have about $400 to spend), what's the right smart speaker for you?

Star Wars droid characters BB8, R2D2 and C3P0 make an appearance at the Academy Awards. Ever since Star Wars first hit theaters in the '70s, many fans have wondered what it might be like to have your own personal R2-D2 by your side. A researcher at Texas A&M says while modern robots aren't exactly the droids we're looking for right now, there are signs robots use similar techniques as R2-D2 and BB-8, introduced during the latest Star Wars movie trilogy. "The word'droid' has become so ubiquitous in our collective consciousness that it is hard to believe that the word was created, and trade marked, by George Lucas," wrote Robin R. Murphy in the latest issue of Science Robotics. "But, it is believable that Star Wars robots can imitate or motivate real science." A feature of both droids applicable to today's robots is the use of nonverbal communication, Murphy writes.

KUMIKO HIRANO has noticed a disquieting change when she goes to her neighbourhood konbini, one of Japan's ubiquitous convenience stores. "No one is around and I have to use a loud voice to get someone to serve me," says the 48-year-old worker in Tokyo. This might not seem a big problem, but Japan prides itself on the standard of customer service, which approaches the level of bespoke attention elsewhere. Taxi drivers, who often wear white gloves, sometimes get out to bow when they drop off a passenger. Staff in shops and restaurants are unfailingly polite.

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Netflix is the place where dreams come true. Or, in the case of Duncan Jones' Mute, where they go to die. Jones has been working on the film, a noir-inflected science-fiction thriller set in a dystopian future Berlin, since even before he made his feature debut with 2009's Moon--and talking it up ever since. But it seemed destined to be one of those projects that was forever just around the corner, always the movie Jones was making after the next one. Even an attempt to more cost-effectively turn the story into a graphic novel fizzled, although Jones released an image from the illustrated work in progress in 2013.

When Hui Wu was growing up in China in the 1990s, she had two interests: fashion and math. The farming town where she lived was so small and poor the fields were tilled by oxen, so there wasn't much opportunity for her to explore the first interest, and she was a girl, so her teachers told her there wasn't much point in pursuing the second, since she would fall behind the boys eventually anyway. Nevertheless, she persisted, winning admission to an elite high school, and she learned computer programming in college. This was something a two-year-old could do. Why was it so hard to train a computer?

Something strange is happening in science fiction. Such are the flora and fauna of what's now being called, rather neatly, the New Weird, the genre's version of the grotesque--though it's only "new" in the sense that it's finally rupturing, like miraculous sidewalk weeds, up through the literary cracks. That's thanks, in very large part, to a very small book called Annihilation. When it came out in 2014, the first in a three-part series, many people professed to love it. Perhaps a few of them genuinely did.

Do you tolerate additional complexity with having ML prediction microservice? The use some basic web framework in the same language as your ML model is (in Python this means probably flask) and call it from anywhere. If you do not tolerate additional complexity, then for example in Tensorflow you can save the model and load in from also any language, which has Tensorflow bindings. Benefit of this is that you can even change network structure and the new structure will be loaded correctly. And if you are asking about which language, you should choose, the answer is obvious: Rust.