Last year was huge for advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. But 2017 may well deliver even more. Here are five key things to look forward to. AlphaGo's historic victory against one of the best Go players of all time, Lee Sedol, was a landmark for the field of AI, and especially for the technique known as deep reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning involves having a machine learn to solve a problem not through programming or explicit examples, but through experimentation combined with positive reinforcement.

In February MIT Technology Review highlighted 10 breakthrough technologies poised to significantly change the world over the next few years. Here's how they have progressed since then. We predicted that 2016 would bring major progress on high-tech cancer cures enabled by using gene editing to tune the human immune system, and it did. First, American scientists got a green light to start using the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to customize T cells and turn them into cancer killers. That study turned out to have the backing of Internet billionaire Sean Parker, who in April had announced he'd give away $250 million toward "hacking" the immune system.

Most people don't buy a jar of relish every week. But when they decide to buy one from Ocado--the world's largest online-only grocery retailer--they don't have to scrabble at the back of the store. Instead, they call on robots and artificial intelligence to have it delivered to their door. Ocado claims that its 350,000-square-foot warehouse in Dorden, near the U.K.'s second city of Birmingham, is more heavily automated than Amazon's warehouse facilities. The company's task is certainly more challenging in many respects: most of the 48,000 lines of goods that it sells are perishable, and many must be chilled or frozen.

Each of these trucks is the size of a small two-story house. None has a driver or anyone else on board. Mining company Rio Tinto has 73 of these titans hauling iron ore 24 hours a day at four mines in Australia's Mars-red northwest corner. At this one, known as West Angelas, the vehicles work alongside robotic rock drilling rigs. The company is also upgrading the locomotives that haul ore hundreds of miles to port--the upgrades will allow the trains to drive themselves, and be loaded and unloaded automatically.

To companies grappling with complex data projects powered by artificial intelligence, a system that Nvidia calls an "AI supercomputer in a box" is a welcome development. Early customers of Nvidia's DGX-1, which combines machine-learning software with eight of the chip maker's highest-end graphics processing units (GPUs), say the system lets them train their analytical models faster, enables greater experimentation, and could facilitate breakthroughs in science, health care, and financial services. Data scientists have been leveraging GPUs to accelerate deep learning--an AI technique that mimics the way human brains process data--since 2012, but many say that current computing systems limit their work. Faster computers such as the DGX-1 promise to make deep-learning algorithms more powerful and let data scientists run deep-learning models that previously weren't possible. It costs $129,000, more than systems that companies could assemble themselves from individual components.

Humans have broken the Internet. Cyberbullying, harassment, social shaming, and sheer unpleasantness plague such sites as Twitter and Reddit, especially if you happen to attract the wrong sort of attention. Consider the way Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones and public relations executive Justine Sacco became targets for mass abuse. The companies that run online services are typically squeezed between charges of indifference to harassment and suppression of free speech. But now Google thinks it can use artificial intelligence to lessen this tragedy of the digital commons.

The "octobot" is a squishy little robot that fits in the palm of your hand and looks like something in a goody bag from a child's birthday party. But despite its quirky name and diminutive size, this bot represents an astonishing advance in robotics. According to the Harvard researchers who created it, it's the first soft robot that is completely self-contained. It has no hard electronic components--no batteries or computer chips--and moves without being tethered to a computer. The octobot is basically a pneumatic tube with a very cute exterior.

According to the Harvard researchers who created it, it's the first soft robot that is completely self-contained. It has no hard electronic components--no batteries or computer chips--and moves without being tethered to a computer. The alternating release of gas is what makes the bot do what looks like a little dance, wiggling its tentacles up and down and moving around in the process. The octobot can move for about eight minutes on one milliliter of fuel. So how do you even build something like this? "You have to make all the parts yourself," says Ryan Truby, a graduate student in Jennifer Lewis's lab at Harvard, where the materials half of this research is taking place.

For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a universal key, and e-mails whose text arrives one letter at a time, all in caps. "Hollywood hacker bullshit," as a character named Romero says in an early episode of Mr. Robot, now in its second season on the USA Network. "I've been in this game 27 years. Not once have I come across an animated singing virus."

Dodge drone crashes with the Phantom 4 from DJI, which includes a collision avoidance system that uses two forward-facing sensors to detect obstacles as far as 49 feet ahead. When the drone detects an object in its path, it will go around it or pause and hover. The quadcopter also features the Tap Fly functionality: if the human pilot taps on a specific object via the smartphone app, the drone will fly toward it.