While a certain level of trust is needed for autonomous cars and smart technologies to reach their full potential, these technologies are not infallible – hence why we're supposed to keep our hands on the wheel of self-driving cars and follow traffic laws, even if they contradict our map app instructions. Recognizing the significance of trust in devices – and the dangers when there is too much of it – Erin MacDonald, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, researches whether products can be designed to encourage more appropriate levels of trust among consumers. The researchers simulated a smart speaker interaction to test how altering peoples' moods might influence the extent to which they trust autonomous products. In a paper published last month in The Journal of Mechanical Design, MacDonald and Ting Liao, her former graduate student, examined how altering peoples' moods influenced their trust in a smart speaker. Their results were so surprising, they conducted the experiment a second time and with more participants – but the results didn't change.

Nothing strikes terror into the hearts of humans more than the idea of an intelligent robot gone bad. The fear is that a robot can acquire the ability to learn and adapt to the point of superseding their human creators…and with evil intentions. From Gort ("The Day the Earth Stood Still") to Sonny ("I, Robot"), films provide a wide variety of potential robot scenarios. Only a few of these film robots have demonstrated artificial intelligence to the point where they have threatened humankind (like the Cyberdyne Systems series T-800 Model 101 in "Terminator" and the unnamed NS-5 robots in "I, Robot"). However the one evil robot that demonstrated its ability to continuously learn through experimentation and failure would be theOmnidroidfrom the "The Incredibles".

As of 2019, more than 14 million Americans owned a robotic vacuum cleaner. Robotic lawn mowers tend to our yards, robotic suitcases follow us through the airport, and smart cooking machines prepare ingredients and implement entire recipes. Some autonomous products even play with and clean up after our pets. These tools are meant to improve people's lives, relieving them of chores and making them happier as a result -- and while some do this, other's don't. How can business leaders ensure that their companies are developing products that people actually feel good about using?

My eyes were opened to many new opportunities to integrate economics, design thinking, big data and data science (AI / ML / DL) to further my case for a Nobel Prize in Economics (which I'd prefer not to be awarded posthumously). So, while we wait for that call from Stockholm, let's take a look at my 10 favorite 2019 blogs: There are many valuable lessons that data scientists can learn from the movie "Mr. And maybe the biggest challenge for the development of smart, autonomous products is knowing when "good enough" is actually "good enough". When trying to optimize the operations of these smart, autonomous products, one must be prepared to realize that the current path to performance optimization may not actually be the optimal path, and the data science team must be prepared to jettison their existing work and try a different approach that might lead to a better performing analytic model. This is an important lesson for the creation of our AI-induced "smart" products – that there must be constant testing, learning, and maybe even some unlearning and re-starting afresh in order to find the optimal models.

The rapid rise of autonomous products reminds me of my days as Director and Technical Fellow at Motorola during the heyday of the wireless revolution. Years earlier, no one could've predicted that millions of cellphones would quickly saturate the market by the early 2000s, causing a scramble to identify viable applications to keep wireless alive. It's hard to imagine a time when widespread wireless wasn't a sure bet, right? Yet there I was in countless meetings brainstorming ideas to promote wireless acceptance. I remember visiting a Chicago-area hospital where each room was overrun with cables. Answers to the recurring question of "How do we get rid of all these wires?" were met with a healthy dose of optimism and skepticism.

Nothing strikes terror into the hearts of humans more than the idea of an intelligent robot gone bad. The fear is that a robot can acquire the ability to learn and adapt to the point of superseding their human creators…and with evil intentions. From Gort ("The Day the Earth Stood Still") to Sonny ("I, Robot"), films provide a wide variety of potential robot scenarios. Only a few of these film robots have demonstrated artificial intelligence to the point where they have threatened humankind (like the Cyberdyne Systems series T-800 Model 101 in "Terminator" and the unnamed NS-5 robots in "I, Robot"). However the one evil robot that demonstrated its ability to continuously learn through experimentation and failure would be the Omnidroid from the "The Incredibles".