Rarely do you get a quick heads-up your world will soon be upended. Rarely do tech-impaired dopes like me get to play with a new technology before it's fully formed. Hop on here ... or here ... or here ... and give it a try. Don't get tricked into believing that today's limitations and glitches will last long. When Google and Microsoft each throw tens -- and ultimately hundreds -- of billions of dollars at something, it gets a lot better, fast.

Scott Hartley: In this world where we focus so much on what we're building, how we're building it, I think we need to take a step back and reconsider why we're building, and really humanize our technology, really bring together diverse teams of methodologies and people and mindsets so that we can take our technology and actually apply it to the most fundamental human problems. Today the conversation is largely about artificial intelligence, and one of the concepts that I like to discuss in the book The Fuzzie and the Techie is this concept of intelligence augmentation--so: thinking about using AI but using it in a way that's augmenting the ability of humans. So Paul English, who was the creator of Kayak.com, he is a techie through and through, but he also calls himself an AI realist; he's somebody who believes in the promise of artificial intelligence, but also realizes that this is not something that tomorrow or next year or maybe perhaps in the next decade is going to completely take away from the characteristics and the qualities of what a human can provide. And so he's now creating a company called Lola that's based in Boston, and Lola is sort of Kayak 2.0, where rather than trying to take the travel industry and put it online he's actually taking travel and putting it back into the hands of travel agents, real people that are working on the phones dealing with people that are calling in to book travel. And what he's doing is he's supplementing those travel agents with technology, with artificial intelligence, really "flipping the letters" and trying to use intelligence augmentation as an AI realist to sort of better the service that a travel agent can provide.

Welcome to Weekly AI News & Insights from Lexalytics, a curated selection of articles and interest pieces brought to you by the leaders in "words-first" artificial intelligence. This week's AI news: AI predictions for 2018; where AI is already rivaling humans; and the Woz is an AI realist. Not everyone is blindly optimistic. Last year, Jeff Catlin laid out some realistic predictions for AI in 2017. In his latest Forbes article, Jeff reviews his predictions and makes new ones for the year ahead. For example, in 2017 Jeff predicted the rise of Big Brother under the guise of Big Tech – a no-brainer, there.