Artificial Intelligence: Trends to Watch in 2017

Google's AlphaGo beat a world champion Go player, a driverless truck completed its first commercial delivery (a 143-mile beer run!) and Microsoft researchers claimed to reach human parity in conversational speech recognition. It was also a year of stumbles, massive hype and painful failures such as Microsoft's chatbot Tay, which learned from the people it interacted with on Twitter, thereby morphing into a racist, hate-spewing embarrassment in less than 24 hours. And, lest we forget, Facebook was widely panned for (and is now taking some steps to address) its laissez-faire attitude about propagating fake news and the possibility that this may have affected the outcome of the presidential election. Taken together, these stories contain the seeds of the major trends I'll be following this year. You're going to see a lot more "Oooh! Shiny!" examples of AI in 2017, and people will send you links to news stories asking why you haven't implemented them yet.