We all know AI, the super villain from Hollywood movies which intends to finish the human race. The Artificial Intelligence, the one watching us all the time, knows our every step, even correctly predicts our future steps. Even outside of the science fiction arena, in our real world Artificial Intelligence is feared to be the job killer. So, how does a company sell this fictional super villain, a real life job killer? How do you sell products based on AI, when people are so scared of them?

Would be naive to think that it's just our personal lives that are dramatically enhanced by the recent progress in artificial intelligence. As a founding partner at a venture studio we embrace these trends and try to help startups we work with to focus on the future rather than how it works today, since the technology we create will definitely create new opportunities and markets tomorrow. And the best way to be prepared for the change is to understand what is driving it and which trends are the most distinguished in a current strive for technological singularity. More and more big companies are trying to outsource their processes to machines or at least break them apart into pieces that can be automated, which may be a major concern to an unskilled layer of workers but can also be a stimulus to spend those saved costs on creating more qualified specialists in the missing areas instead. The part that we still don't get is how machines make certain decisions, even Google engineers are out of touch how their algorithms work now thanks to the complexity of a given system, which is a serious concern and a stopping point for us to completely trust AI.

Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) was similar to nuclear fusion in unfulfilled promise. It had been around a long time but had not reached the spectacular heights foreseen in its infancy. AI is swiftly becoming the foundational technology in areas as diverse as self-driving cars and financial trading. Self- learning algorithms are now routinely embedded in mobile and online services. Researchers have leveraged massive gains in processing power and the data streaming from digital devices and connected sensors to improve AI performance.

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze large patient data sets promises to change the face of population health management in a way that will be far reaching across the industry and a game changer to the way physicians monitor and care for their patients. AI's ability to raise the level of evidence-based medicine can help primary care physicians make better decisions in several areas. These include the ability to determine appropriate treatments for their patients and to how best to monitor their care during and after hospitalization, to improving efficiency and productivity in care team workflows and finding better ways to reduce overall costs associated with patient care. Supercomputers that compare and analyze large groups of patients' clinical data, diagnostic images and claims data, are capable of identifying subtle patterns and changes in health and wellness that can foreshadow the start of an illness, monitor the effectiveness of drug treatments and identify patients' health risks. For example, when researchers at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, wanted to find out which patients with pulmonary hypertension had the greatest risk of heart failure, they used AI software to analyze images of patients' hearts and constructed a smart 3D heart that predicts patient survival rates.

Artificial intelligence (AI) got a lot of press in 2016, not least because of the victory of Google's AI program over Lee Sedol, the world's best Go player. That triumph of machine over human elicited numerous responses, some enthusiastic and some anxious, all sharing the assumption that the goal of artificial intelligence is to achieve "human-level intelligence" or, as some predict, "superintelligence." "I don't care so much whether what we are building is real intelligence," says Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. "We know how to build real intelligence--my wife and I did it twice, although she did a lot more of the work. We don't need to duplicate humans. That's why I focus on having tools to help us rather than duplicate what we already know how to do. We want humans and machines to partner and do something that they cannot do on their own."

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures--short films, music videos, commercials--that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people's bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, "Swiss Army Man"--starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway--premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it "weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented." Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call. The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel's music scene--a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of "The Wall"--only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, "I Can't Be Sad Anymore," which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed--altering, in real time, the song's vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch's words "I want to drink less / but be more drunk." Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics "I want to work less / but for a greater cause."

"I had the worst dream," said Professor Einstein. "My vast intellect had been downloaded into a prosthetic body. I was then made to present the world of science to perfect strangers." Within moments of being activated, the 14-inch robotic replica of Albert Einstein made a meta comment about being trapped in a knowledge-dispensing machine. It shook its head from side to side and slowly blinked its eyes as if it were contemplating his situation.

Slack and similar workplace chat software may have changed how we communicate with our coworkers, but they haven't necessarily cut down on how often we communicate with them. Now, the San Francisco-based Slack believes the next big improvement in office communication will be software that helps workers stay on top of important messages. "It's actually quite time consuming sometimes to keep up with Slack," says Noah Weiss, who heads Slack's Search, Learning, and Intelligence department. Broadly speaking, Weiss and his team are working on making their software better at surfacing important conversations and information, similar to the way Netflix surfaces movie recommendations based on users' viewing habits. On a practical level, Slack hopes to cut down the amount of time it takes to catch up on a day's worth of Slack messages from more than an hour to 10 minutes, Weiss says.

I read a book today, oh boy. Actually, I read a lot of books--not quite one per day, but close to one each week in 2016. When browsing the Internet, I am continually bombarded with stories about politics that cause me to wonder what is happening in the world. I have such a love for progress, but civility, globalization and acceptance of others were seemingly going backward in 2016. As I look through the list of books that I read during the past year, apparently I was immersing myself in books about how changes in technology and social connections can propel the world in the direction I would like to see it take.

Last week's World Economic Forum in snowy Davos, Switzerland, brought a blizzard of proclamations about the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence, along with an avalanche of debate over its job-killing potential. The good news for us humans is that the current generation of AI technologies being used to automate data collection and processing -- such as machine-learning software that amasses more expertise as it analyzes data or neural networks modeled after the human brain -- are more likely to augment the human workforce rather than replace it. Indeed, almost two-thirds of the business executives responding to a survey released last week by IT consulting firm Infosys (PDF) said they believed AI would "bring out the best in their organization's people." The rise of AI, the Infosys poll respondents suggest, will place a premium on skills such as creativity and logical reasoning. Noted IBM chairwoman and CEO Ginni Rometty, in remarks Wednesday at Davos, said: "History has taught us many things. When you [have] powerful technologies, you have a responsibility that they're introduced in the right way." "This pivotal investment will empower our team to accelerate R&D and enhance our proprietary technology with the latest innovations in machine learning and natural language processing while broadening our expertise in CSR analysis to foster environmental, social and ethical performance at a global scale," said EcoVadis co-CEO Frederic Trinel, in a statement.