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Within a decade, our living spaces will be enhanced by a host of new devices and technologies, performing a range of household functions and redefining what it means to feel at home. The promise of devices that not only meet our household needs but anticipate them as well has been around for decades. To date, that promise remains largely unfulfilled. Advances such as the Nest thermostat by Alphabet (parent company to Google) and Amazon's Alexa personal assistant are notable, but the home-technology market as a whole remains fragmented, and the potential for a truly smart home is still unrealized. A tipping point may be at hand.

Every step forward in artificial intelligence (AI) challenges assumptions about what machines can do. Myriad opportunities for economic benefit have created a stable flow of investment into AI research and development, but with the opportunities come risks to decision-making, security and governance. Increasingly intelligent systems supplanting both blue- and white-collar employees are exposing the fault lines in our economic and social systems and requiring policy-makers to look for measures that will build resilience to the impact of automation. Leading entrepreneurs and scientists are also concerned about how to engineer intelligent systems as these systems begin implicitly taking on social obligations and responsibilities, and several of them penned an Open Letter on Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence in late 2015.1 Whether or not we are comfortable with AI may already be moot: more pertinent questions might be whether we can and ought to build trust in systems that can make decisions beyond human oversight that may have irreversible consequences. By providing new information and improving decision-making through data-driven strategies, AI could potentially help to solve some of the complex global challenges of the 21st century, from climate change and resource utilization to the impact of population growth and healthcare issues.

This week, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) released the first images from its new weather satellite, GEOS-16. With more than 4,000 man-made satellites in orbit, one more might seem like a mundane news, but this particular satellite has significant implications for travel. Its presence is also a perfect example of the growing importance of connected intelligence as a technological necessity for virtually every industry. From a tech perspective, the new satellite is like upgrading from a black and white flip phone to the latest iPhone. The'Advanced Baseline Imager' - the main instrument in the new satellite - is capable of capturing at least 60 times more data per day than its predecessor, and that's not the only data the satellite is gathering.

America's largest tech companies face a growing backlash over the potentially negative impacts of their strategic decisions and innovations. For example, companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and product roadmaps that will replace millions of jobs during the coming years. Experts in marketing, technology and social awareness say it's time for technology providers to assume greater responsibility for the personal pain that comes along with the collective gain. Emerging technology is at almost perpetual odds with the status quo, but U.S. society is coming to realize that dynamic can lead to job losses, unfair treatment of social services and a stain on civic engagement. The power and influence that some tech companies command is being reevaluated in light of the myriad ways people are being disenfranchised in some way by their actions.

They see it as a way of saying "Hasta la vista, baby" to years of sluggish economic growth. The federal Liberals are expected to use the upcoming federal budget to foster the development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence in the hope it will be a springboard to attracting investment and creating a highly-skilled new sector of jobs. Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains says fostering AI is one of the pillars of the government's economic growth strategy. He and others see an opportunity for Canada to exploit its competitive advantage in a technology that is becoming ubiquitous across all sectors -- from major companies such as Google or Microsoft to the banking and automotive sectors. The government's vision of AI-enabled growth is not rooted in the apocalyptic science fiction of Terminator movies where robots destroy humanity (Arnold Schwarzenegger appropriated the Spanish phrase "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2: Judgement Day before sparking some spectacular explosions). Instead, Bains and others point to two Canadian "pioneers" in AI -- Geoff Hinton at the University of Toronto and Montreal computer scientist Yoshua Bengio.

Scan today's headlines and it seems that every business is adopting artificial intelligence (AI), or more accurately, machine learning. Everyone is being told that they need AI, but few know why -- and even fewer know how to use it. The truth is, AI is complex in nature. As the CTO of a company with a foundation in AI, trust me when I tell you that it's harder to implement than you might think. AI and machine learning are not commonplace today because we still lack a few essential building blocks, like a robust software infrastructure around core algorithms, or the interfaces to easily make use of those algorithms.

The mechanics behind machine learning and artificial intelligence can tax many a non-techy brain at the best of times. But the travel industry should be aware of how prevalent it will become in various processes (especially in customer service) and how it can also solve many problems. Here is a good example, and one which is at the heart of one of the fundamental aspects of the travel experience: language. In late-2016, Google quietly pushed out what some are considering to be one of the most "astonishing" updates in the field of machine learning. The ten-year-old Google Translate platform, which apparently deciphers 140 billion words every day across 103 languages for thousands of websites and search terms, switched from its previous system to something called Neural Machine Translation (Google NMT).

Raspberry Pi will probably getting a taste of some advanced artificial intelligence tools from Google as Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the search giant is planning to make its "range of smart tools" available for the maker community this year. The machine learning technology from Google will enable makers from the Raspberry Pi community to make even more powerful projects than before, the company said in its official blog. Google has even asked makers to share ideas through a survey so that the company can meet smart tools for the makers. Thank you for taking the time to take our survey. We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers, and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful.

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