X-ray vision, hidden meanings and disease trackers: IBM's 5 in 5 for 2017

While its late chairman Thomas Watson might have famously downplayed demand for computers back in the 1940s (to be fair, the machines he was referring to were clunky beasts that took up an entire room), that hasn't stopped the tech giant from making predictions about future trends. Since 2005, IBM has been releasing an annual list of five technological advancements that it thinks will take off in the next five years. In the past, they've focused on urbanization as well as machine learning and big data (with mixed results – perhaps five years is too optimistic a time frame for many of these technologies to take root). Unsurprisingly, given the emergence of AI and the Internet of Things, this year's predictions are focused on these two areas.