Siri had a good run, but its time in the spotlight is over. Alexa has arrived, and it's way smarter than Siri. Alexa, of course, is the voice-activated "smart" assistant lurking inside the Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap products. If you own one of these gadgets, you probably know the basics by now--you can ask Alexa for today's weather forecast, a daily news briefing, an oven timer or a favorite playlist. But as the Echo family of products has grown, so has the ecosystem that surrounds it.

Where appropriate, we brought back trends from previous reports, once they had hit tipping point or promised new value.We looked ahead to predict which consumer segments will be most affected by the trend, how it will evolve, and identified brands that are leading the way. They are the early adopters of new technology. Millennials – those born after 1982 – are adept at making the most of technology to create a world of difference for themselves. Technology has given them the freedom to redefine the way they work, play, shop and to take control of their daily activities. Their dependence on their smartphones and other new technologies sets their expectations for how they want to engage with brands. Generation Z – defined loosely as those born after the late 1990s – are the first true digital native generation, and are the native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the internet.

Rogue One, the latest in the Star Wars franchise, has had mixed reviews but features one undisputed star: K-2SO, a gangly robot with the best lines. Movies of the distant future always tap into current anxieties, and the latest alarm is that the robots are coming. Droids may not conquer the world, but they will take over its work--white-collar as well as blue-collar. Could these filmmakers know something we don't? Previous scares, such as when TIME magazine reported on "the automation jobless" in the early 1960s, were just that.

Prolific science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As technology advances, what once was deemed "fantasy" begins to materialize in the world around us. Movies inspire us to have fun with the idea that any sufficiently capable magic is indistinguishable from technology – on-screen magic makes things like teleportation, omnipotent medicine and the creation of objects out of thin air all seem real. In many ways we already live in a future predicted by yesterday's science fiction, with interactive touch devices connected to a vast world of information. These universal machines can support experiences of ever-greater richness and complexity.

The best science fiction blends reality and imagination, so a viewer walks away contemplating the limits of human possibility. The worst take leaps of faith that toss a viewer into an oblivion of head scratching. Passengers, a space thriller directed by the Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum and starring Hollywood mainstays Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, begins in the first category before rocketing into the second. In the film, Avalon -- a commercial starship -- ferries more than 5,000 colonists on a voyage from Earth to a new home world called Homestead II. To survive the 120-year trip, the travelers are placed into induced hibernation, but an accident rouses Chris Pratt's character -- mechanical engineer Jim Preston -- 90 years early.

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 the 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.

All of this, on paper, is kind of bananas--and would have been better treated by a bananas movie. Instead, Assassin's Creed is cold in the service of its plot and dutiful in the service of its action. It feels, in other words, like a movie that may check off plenty of gamers' boxes. Unfortunately, no one behind the camera bothered to locate much heart. The only other exception comes during a brief moment when Callum, beginning to lose it after a rough ride in the Animus, begins singing some Patsy Cline. "I'm crazy for trying, I'm crazy for crying," Fassbender cackles, channeling a bit of the gonzo outsider frontman he portrayed in the wonderful 2014 film Frank.

The piano ditty below, which ascends jauntily, then finishes with a tuneful flourish, sounds a bit like a jingle composed for the latest toothpaste campaign. The tune was, in fact, dreamed up by a musical AI program developed at Google. And the program's latest compositions show how combining a powerful machine-learning approach with simple musical rules can produce creative works that sound remarkably human. Music composition is an enigmatic form of human creativity. Songwriting programs already exist, but they typically follow a specific set of rules, and they tend to produce tunes that feel rigid and mechanical.

I ran the 100 meter dash, and broke across the finish line in record time. As I danced around in victory, my enthusiasm was not diminished by the fact that I was 8-years-old, and my only opponents had been my asthmatic neighbor and a few action figures that hadn't moved from the starting line. By this metric, Assassin's Creed has also won a gold medal. It's the best video game movie I've seen to date, but as everyone knows, that's quite a low bar. Stacked up against the larger world of weird sci-fi outings and action blockbusters, it just doesn't hold up, and yes, once again we still are stuck at merely "decent," rather than becoming that eternally out-of-reach "great" video game movie adaptation.

The main difference between data analysis today, compared with a decade or two ago, is the way that we interact with it. Previously, the role of statistics was primarily to extend our mental models by discovering new correlations and causal rules. Today, we increasingly delegate parts of our reasoning processes to algorithmic models that live outside our mental models. In my next few posts, I plan to explore some of the issues that arise from this delegation and how ideas such as model interpretability can potentially address them. Throughout this series of posts, I will argue that while current research has barely scratched the surface of understanding the interaction between algorithmic and mental models, these issues will be much more important to the future of data analysis than the technical performance of the models themselves.