"Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming" -- David Bowie Like all new year's traditions, my unveiling of The Crystal Ball (tm) at Forbes comes when the slate is clean, the resolutions are resolved, the possibilities seem... possible. Of course, the sobering reality is that 12 months from now, I'll look back at this list of predictions with a mix of wonder at how many came close to the mark and how many woefully missed. For an idea of how that worked last year, you can look at my review of 2016: Recapping Last Year's Predictions: Trumped! As 2017 kicks off, we all want to know what will happen. Like most of you, I have no secret formula.

That was the repeated response from Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz when Reed Albergotti of The Information asked about the technology behind the startup's augmented-reality glasses. For months, as Albergotti recently reported, Magic Leap has wooed investors and journalists by strapping them into a bulky helmet that augments their world with Star Wars-like spaceships and other digital creations. But this helmet is too big and too expensive for the mass market, so the company is working to squeeze its technology into a sleek pair of wire-rim glasses. The rub, according to ex-employees speaking with The Information, is that the company is having trouble actually making that happen. Abovitz wouldn't let Albergotti try the glasses on, and when asked how they work, all he would say was: "Squirrels and sea monkeys."

The "willing suspension of disbelief" is the idea that we (the audience, readers, viewers, content consumers) are willing to suspend judgment about the implausibility of the narrative for the quality of our own enjoyment. We do it all the time. Two-dimensional video on our screens is smaller than life and flat and not in real time, but we ignore those facts and immerse ourselves in the stories as if they were real. We have also learned the "conventions" of each medium. While we watch a movie or a video, we don't yell to the characters on the screen "Duck!" or "Look out!" when something is about to happen to them.

Q: I got Amazon Echo for Christmas. It tells me the weather and plays music. What else can it do? It seems like a waste of money to me. A: At its core, Amazon's Echo is a Bluetooth speaker that responds to voice commands.

In February, I took a job designing the personality of a chatbot called Kai. I ghostwrite the lines it says, and I have thought, while testing it, that talking to myself has rarely been so unpredictable. Kai, which was conceived by my employer, Kasisto, to help customers with online banking, works over text message, Slack, and especially Facebook Messenger, where more than thirty-four thousand other chatbots have joined it since April, when Facebook opened the platform to developers. Many of these bots possess no personality. The ones created by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, for instance, greet first-time users with "we," as if the whole newsroom were on the other side of the screen, and run keyword searches rather than engaging in conversation.

In December, footage emerged of the Japanese film director Hayao Miyazaki visiting the Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Tokyo. In the clip, which was broadcast as part of an NHK documentary, the director of Spirited Away is shown a video of a computerised humanoid creature that has taught itself to walk by using its head and buttocks to shimmy along the ground. After the presentation Miyazaki sits in thought, before issuing his verdict. "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever," he says. Miyazaki's delivery has none of the vein-throbbing fury of a Gordon Ramsay – only the life-haunting melancholy of the disappointed father.

The dataset used for the analysis was obtained from Kaggle Datasets, and is attributed to UCI Machine Learning. The raw tabular data includes information about news category (business, science and technology, entertainment, etc.) R language has some useful packages for text pre-processing and natural language processing. I prefer fread() over read.csv() For the scope of this program, we limit ourselves to only the headline text and publisher name. We use a "for loop" to filter and a custom function aggregate the headline texts for each publisher.

Kodak's "Shirley Card" was given to photo processors to judge coloring in photos (Photo: the Nick DeWolf Foundation / Susan Etlinger) Is artificial intelligence bound to its makers' prejudices? At TEDxBerlin, data analyst Susan Etlinger turns to the past to investigate the future of AI. In the 1950s, photography in the U.S. was dominated by the Kodak company, and its staff's opinions of what is normal, Etlinger says. The company sent photo processors color-correction cards based on a single model named Shirley -- a white woman -- and Shirley became the poster woman for "normal" coloring in photos. "If Shirley looked good, the prints looked good," Etlinger says, "…and this was terrible for photographs of people of color."

Facebook has hidden a special new year easter egg in its website. The site is letting people celebrate New Year's Eve by watching fairly dismal fireworks light up their news feed. On New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, any time anyone writes the words "Happy New Year", they'll turn blue. Whenever anyone clicks on those words, a little firework animation will play. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Today's tech buzzword, Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be a difficult concept for many people to wrap their heads around. AI technology, which arguably holds vast potential to revolutionize the way the world works, is nonetheless often used to paint an apocalyptic view of the future. We now live in a world where talking computers and self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future – but are we also at risk of developing computers so smart that they can replace humans? Influential tech figures such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have cautioned the industry against diving head-on into AI – because the technology's implementation could do more harm than good if we aren't careful. While there's no arguing that some of the cautionary tales around AI hold merit, our current reality is far from the robot-run society we've seen in the movies.