3 Things I Learned About the Future of Technology at This Year's CES

In a dimly lit ballroom inside the MGM casino in Las Vegas earlier this month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was discussing a strange topic in front of a very eager crowd: Different species of flowers. That may seem out of place to anyone familiar with Nvidia, a company best known for graphics processors that power everything from gaming computers to driverless cars. But Huang was illustrating how his company's technology could use machine learning to identify and label more than 900 images of flowers in just a second. It was a fitting way to kick off this year's CES, the biggest tech show of the year. Many of the show's announcements and exhibitions centered on artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in smart homes, smart cars, and smart everything.