True, set manufacturers are bombarding consumers with a whole series of buzzwords -- OLED, 4K, 8K, HDR, QLED, wide color gamut -- intended to spur excitement and generate sales. Flashy new sets with these supposedly "must have" features are getting the spotlight Wednesday at the annual CES gadget show in Las Vegas. But when it comes down to it, none of these amount to revolutionary improvements for your living room. Set manufacturers may not have run out of technological tricks yet, but for this year, at least, they're reduced to improving what's already out there. "That's a good thing," said Gartner analyst Brian Blau, looking for the bright side.

From winning Jeopardy in 2011 to helping write a sad song last year, IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform is all over popular culture. Press releases fly out about Watson producing a movie trailer, powering a Macy's shopping app, even controlling lights on an internet-connected dress--along with more serious applications like working on cancer treatments. It seems, from IBM's hype, that Watson can do everything. But Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief innovation officer, wants to dial back the hype in some ways, calling Watson "just the first step on a very, very long road." Watson can be helpful in a lot of industries, such as medicine, which are awash in data, but it can't replace people, he says.

All the media drones fly early, at once, at the bell. Get lots of comfy gel around our eyes and ears to make sure we can stay looped in for a good long time. Fifty years ago, people wondered if journalists, or "professional" media, would still exist. It does, now, but it's sometimes indistinguishable from its homegrown social media counterpart. Even more filter bubbles, because no one really wants to be truly alone.

Google's AlphaGo beat a world champion Go player, a driverless truck completed its first commercial delivery (a 143-mile beer run!) and Microsoft researchers claimed to reach human parity in conversational speech recognition. It was also a year of stumbles, massive hype and painful failures such as Microsoft's chatbot Tay, which learned from the people it interacted with on Twitter, thereby morphing into a racist, hate-spewing embarrassment in less than 24 hours. And, lest we forget, Facebook was widely panned for (and is now taking some steps to address) its laissez-faire attitude about propagating fake news and the possibility that this may have affected the outcome of the presidential election. Taken together, these stories contain the seeds of the major trends I'll be following this year. You're going to see a lot more "Oooh! Shiny!" examples of AI in 2017, and people will send you links to news stories asking why you haven't implemented them yet.

While Apple and others have made the leap to two cameras, ASUS have got one step further - with a triple sensor. The firm's new Zenfone AR has a traditional 23-megapixel sensor, alongside motion-tracking and depth-sensing cameras. It can combine four native 23-megapixel photos to create a single image --something the company is calling a 92-megapixel'super resolution' photo. The Zenfone AR has a 23-megapixel camera sensor, alongside motion-tracking and depth-sensing cameras, allowing it to scan a room and superimpose images on it. Asus has revealed a new smartphone which uses Google Tango 3D technology and allows users to experience augmented and virtual reality.

Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. The Eagle Huntress A portrait of a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia who defies eons of tradition by learning to hunt with fierce golden eagles is a documentary so satisfying it makes you feel good about feeling good. The Edge of Seventeen Hailee Steinfeld gives a superb performance as a high-school misfit in Kelly Fremon Craig's disarmingly smart teen dramedy, the rare coming-of-age picture that feels less like a retread than a renewal. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Handmaiden The most absorbing feature in years from South Korean director Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy") is a teasingly witty and elegant puzzle-box of a thriller about two women (played by Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee) pursuing their destinies in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea.

Traditionally, marketing has been about broadcasting your generic message to as many people as possible with the hopes that someone will listen. But this approach is about as persuasive as the guy on the street corner dancing to Kanye West tunes and spinning around the discounted tax prep promotion sign. But for most of us, it's not going to drive action. So instead of a flashing sign with a broad message, it's a well-crafted, personalized message that works to remind you that yes, you did buy a house this year and yes, you can save $3,500 if you prepay your interest. Modern brands like Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb are already taking this personalized approach to marketing.

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything.

The iPhone 7 has turbocharged the move to wireless headphones, but even without cords, we're still tethered to our phones in a very real way. Think about what you need to do to change up your music. Regardless of your cable situation, you need to pull out your phone, tap on your music app, navigate to another playlist or song, hit play, then put the phone back in your pocket. Why can't you just speak what you want to play -- your headphones have a mic, after all, but Siri isn't much good beyond skipping tracks and doing some basic stuff with Apple Music. SEE ALSO: Musical Christmas necktie accidentally undercuts parliament member's passionate speech Here's where a new company called Speak Music is trying to fill in the gap.

Machine learning has evolved from science fiction movie plots to everyday reality in just a short time.