The only thing that flies faster than time is the progress of technology. Once after lunch, a chip-designing friend excused himself quickly with the deft explanation that Moore's Law meant that he had to make his chip set 0.67 percent faster each week, even while on vacation. Now that 2017 is here, it's time to take stock of the technological changes ahead, if only to help you know where to place your bets in building programming skills for the future. From the increasing security headache of the internet of things to machine learning everywhere, the future of programming keeps getting harder to predict. There are naysayers who claim the chip companies have hit a wall.

It started as a seemingly sweet Twitter chatbot. Modeled after a millennial, it awakened on the internet from behind a pixelated image of a full-lipped young female with a wide and staring gaze. Microsoft, the multinational technology company that created the bot, named it Tay, assigned it a gender, and gave "her" account a tagline that promised, "The more you talk the smarter Tay gets!" She brimmed with enthusiasm: "can i just say that im stoked to meet u? humans are super cool." She asked innocent questions: "Why isn't #NationalPuppyDay everyday?" Tay's designers built her to be a creature of the web, reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and engage in human conversations and get better at it by interacting with people over social media. As the day went on, Tay gained followers. She also quickly fell prey to Twitter users targeting her vulnerabilities. For those internet antagonists looking to manipulate Tay, it didn't take much effort; they engaged the bot in ugly conversations, tricking the technology into mimicking their racist and sexist behavior.

There is no denying that we are entering a new phase in how technology helps to connect brands with consumers. We are moving from visual interfaces to text and voice. Speaking to our devices like we speak to our friends, family and colleagues. As messenger apps secure the lion's share of our connected time, customers will increasingly expect and want to interact with brands in these channels. And Facebook, and Viber, and Kik, want to connect you with brands on their platform, like (most of) China does on WeChat which has 800 million users and millions of services available within the app.

TLDR; Virtual Reality can be immersive and fun, but add natural deep Artificial Intelligence and you quite literally get a new world which -- beyond the computer generated world around you -- may not actually be so virtual. As applications in Virtual Reality are increasing in quality and variety, early developers are providing us with new interaction dynamics that are expanding the richness of immersive virtual worlds. By layering in aspects of natural artificial intelligence, experiences are developing that lose the feeling of being so "unreal;" distinct memories, interactions and relationships are being created that cause the user to question -- well, if it happens in real life, but inside of a headset, does that not make it real? Of our five senses, Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) handle vision, a solid pair of 3D headphones like OSSIC handle sound; AxonVR and others are working on haptics and touch…next up is smell and taste, those should be, well…interesting. But beyond our five senses which create the feeling of physical "presence" in a virtual space, is the "immersion" of having a real experience, experiencing the unexpected and having the opportunity to create very real memories.

Sears wants to use artificial intelligence to help to shop for your next tire. Sears Auto Center announced the pilot launch of its Digital Tire Journey, a web app that uses IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier service to help customers find the best tires that fit their needs. Hoffman Estates-based Sears says that beyond a vehicle's make and model, customers need tires that are built for their everyday routines, and its new AI-powered site is designed to make the shopping experience more efficient. Rather than using a drop down menu with available selections, Sears' Digital Tire Journey provides tire recommendations based on a customers answer to certain questions. The program asks questions like: "When it comes to tires, what's most important to you?"

Researchers led by Andre Esteva and Brett Kuprel at Stanford University trained a neural network on more than 129,000 images of skin lesions associated with 2000 different diseases. They then pitted it against 21 certified dermatologists on new sets of images to find out whether deep-learning algorithms could reliably pick out cancerous moles and lesions.

If caught early, skin cancer isn't particularly deadly. But unfortunately for many, signs and symptoms go unnoticed until health has irreversibly deteriorated. Research findings published in Nature today hint at a future where anyone, anywhere, might be able to perform a basic skin cancer screening on a smartphone. Utilizing machine learning, a Stanford team, including Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, was able to match the accuracy of dermatologists at identifying skin cancer. The classifier the group built is in no way a panacea offering people a precise and irrefutable cancer diagnoses.

We're all getting used to the thought that in a not-so-distant future, competition for jobs won't just be other humans, it will also be an intelligent robot, self-driving car, or other artificial agent. But in our gut, we know this can't be the full truth, that there's a more nuanced story. We at least believe that elite human skills will remain valuable even as automation eats the world. The hard part is figuring out which ones will be the most valuable and where they will be the most prized. As a parent, this can be a particularly vexing problem when thinking about how to advise your kids.

Robots are about convenience, so why do we fear them? They bring us a better life and freedom from repetitive tasks. When I have children one day, I want them to grow up with helpful robots. What can Alexa or Pepper or Kuri be in ten years time? Alexa is my conversational partner of choice.

Whether it's opening Google Maps for directions, shopping on Amazon, or watching movies on Netflix, 2016 was the year that bots truly hit mainstream. This seismic development -- which has critical implications for businesses, consumers, and, indeed, humankind -- is the result of three developments that came to a head in 2016: First, an unprecedented capacity to analyze data; second, a backlash (limited though it was) to protect what data can be analyzed; and third, a welcoming of automation into our lives that we couldn't have fathomed even a few years ago. At this moment, we have more data than ever before. We're creating information at a bewildering pace -- approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, which is enough to fill 57.5 billion iPads (at 32 gigabytes apiece). Big data is now a given, affecting every industry and function.