We ask Siri for recommendations on where to eat, ask Google for directions to the restaurant, ask our car to play music or make a phone call, ask our house to turn on the lights and the heat before we get home. Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong-based life science venture capital company, has already appointed an AI robot to its board of directors. The robot, called Vital (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences) was designed to analyze trends in the data of certain companies in an effort to predict successful investments. Vital is an equal member of the board and is expected to eventually be given an equal vote in all financial decisions made by the company. "The variables involved in the long-term success of a biotechnology company are many and complex," Deep Knowledge Ventures said in a statement.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off in Las Vegas this week, with technology companies from around the globe descending on "Sin City" to showcase their latest gadgets and offer a glimpse into our digital future. From the camcorder and the CD player to the Xbox and the plasma TV, some of the best-known technologies of all time have debuted at CES, and some of the most famous industry figures have given keynotes, including Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Elon Musk. This year marks the show's 50th annivarsary. The first CES kicked off in 1967, with 250 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees gathered in New York City. Since then, CES has grown by more than 10-fold, and now encompasses both traditional and non-traditional tech industries.

Each year is filled with unforeseen surprises--advances we thought were years away, unexpected technology applications (like AI used for mental healthcare), and unlikely startups reimagining entire markets. These breakthroughs keep Singularity Hub's team of tech-enthusiasts on our toes around the clock. Though we can't forecast like famous futurist Ray Kurzweil, many of us have a favorite technology or two that we constantly track. Moving into the new year, these are some of the technologies we'll be eagerly watching in 2017 and beyond. "AI really made headlines this year. AlphaGo was on the tongue, OpenAI got a billion dollars to develop ethical AI, and toddlers talked to Google Home and Amazon Echo. The first two developments are fascinating, but the third may be more immediately relevant. The idea of X product AI will get legs next year--but it's the surprises I'm most looking forward to." "Cybersecurity means a lot of things to a lot of people, and often one person's definition is at total odds with another's. For me, I long for the type of unbeatable encryption promised by quantum computing, because quantum computing is going to make today's encryption worthless. Meanwhile, billions of smart gadgets are coming online, and most of us already conduct our daily lives by digital means. With governments demanding access to digital devices and histories, I fear loss of citizen privacy, but still have faith in the democratization of cybersecurity."

Pretty much all of the tech giants attend the vast Vegas expo - either to unveil new products or to clinch deals behind the scene. But in recent years it's been start-ups that have had many of the most eye-arresting and sensational reveals. There are more at this year's show than ever before, thanks in part to crowdfunding. They now have to convince retailers - hunting through the halls for the next bestsellers - that the promise of their concept videos has been delivered upon. Dozens of start-ups are also there thanks to help from governments and other national bodies - France, Israel, Ukraine and the Netherlands all have stands where they'll fly the flag for local talent.

When new engineers join Facebook--no matter whether they're just out of college or VP-level veterans--they spend their first six weeks in Bootcamp, an intensive program designed to help them learn the ins and outs of the company's massive code base and the always-evolving set of programming tools at their disposal. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's original engineer, contributed more to that code than anyone else in the early years of its existence. But the 32-year-old CEO never went through the Bootcamp program, which was launched in 2006, two years after he founded the company in his Harvard dorm room. Last January, Zuckerberg announced that he planned to build an AI system to run his home using Facebook tools, in the latest of the personal-growth challenges he gives himself each year. An exciting exploration of the state of the art of AI--a technology field essential to Facebook's future--the project also forced him to refresh his command of the company's programming tools and processes.

Artificial intelligence has played a role in customer service for some time now, but it's only recently that its full potential for transforming the customer experience has come to light. Conversational commerce is redefining the role of messaging apps in customer engagement, while self-service tools continue to simplify the customer service process and shift the role of human customer service agents in the contact center. Here are six ways artificial intelligence is reshaping customer experiences of both the present and the future. Big data is a key player in targeted marketing practices, offering brands important insights into customer behavior. Artificial intelligence technology may interpret big data to identify customer browsing patterns, purchase history, recent access to customer devices, and most visited webpages.

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.

This post is authored by Scott Haynie, Senior Software Engineer, and Senja Filipi, Software Engineer, at Microsoft. Telemetry plays an important role when you operationalize new experiences/apps that span the web, mobile and IoT, including new gadgets such as the Microsoft HoloLens. The abundance of data that is made available can help developers monitor and track system health and usage patterns, and provide important new insights into how users interact with your application. Tapping into this wealth of information can really help you align your customers' experiences with their needs and expectations. At the Ignite 2016 Innovation Keynote, we showed the future of home improvement as envisioned by Lowe's and Microsoft.

Google Assistant and the smart speaker Google Home have some opinions on how to be a better person in 2017. Ask "What should my New Year's resolution be?" and the AI assistant will tell you to do things like write a novel or pick up calligraphy. Here are the five answers to the question Google Assistant gave VentureBeat when we asked earlier today. Nothing earth-shattering or controversial about this ability, but it's not a question Alexa or Siri attempt to answer. You could write a novel or keep a journal.

If you like our content, please sign up for our newsletter here. Thank you for supporting Last Week in the Future in 2016. This week's special New Years Edition will feature IoT & ML/AI highlights from 2016 and list trends to watch in 2017. In 2016, we saw the rise of voice UIs with the success of the Amazon Echo and the Google Home. We also experienced the AR/VR boom with Oculus Rift, HTC, PTC, and Microsoft all pushing more updates on their AR/VR headsets plus the explosive popularity of Pokemon Go.