A self driving robotic racing car is set to take on the world's best human drivers at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. The Roborace car, which is powered by four 135kW electric motors and uses an artificial intelligence driver, will drive up the event's 1.16-mile hillclimb course, famed for its tight turns, hay bales, flint walls and forests. It has previously raced city circuits around the world as part of the Formula E race series. The Roborace car, which is powered by four 135kW electric motors and uses an artificial intelligence driver, will drive up the event's 1.16-mile hillclimb course, the first time an autonomous vehicle has been allowed to compete'We are excited that the Duke of Richmond [FoS founder] has invited us to make history at Goodwood as we attempt the first ever fully - and truly - autonomous uphill climb using only artificial intelligence,' said Lucas di Grassi, Roborace CEO. The automated driving system the Roborace car will use at Goodwood has been developed by automotive technology company Arrival.

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Natalie Fratto, VP of Early Stage Practice at Silicon Valley bank. On the walk back from her high school, Max drops by the corner bodega to pick up a NeuroStim pill -- a prescription neuro-plasticity stimulator. Neurostim will accelerate her brain's ability to create new synaptic pathways, helping her quickly learn new behaviors and spot new connections when exposed to rapidly changing stimuli. The AEI is a standardized test, implemented 10 years ago in place of the SAT. It has become a globally accepted metric for aptitude and projected performance in the modern workplace.

And it wasn't just the weekly political dramas, sexual harassment scandals or a massive security breach that affected nearly half the population that had us down. There was also a slew of terrible consumer devices that sullied our mood this year. Before we say goodbye to them, though, let's relive the horror one last time. Here's hoping that 2018 brings us better gadgets than this sorry lot. Even though Juicero technically debuted in 2016, it wasn't until 2017 that it met its epic end, and it's for that reason we're naming it one of the worst gadgets of the year.

In an increasingly competitive retail environment, competition on price, or even quality and mix of goods, will create only transitory wins. Those factors bring customers only until your competitor sees your success and then does the same thing. Most retailers understand that real success in today's environment comes with delivering on the customer experience factor. When you compete on price, you will have customers until the next guy sells the same thing for a dollar less – when you deliver a memorable customer experience, you create lasting loyalty. The question is, how to deliver that customer experience?

Mike Toscano, the former president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, emphatically declared at the September RobotLab forum that "anyone who claims to know the future of the [robotics] industry is lying, I mean no one could've predicted the computing mobile revolution." These words acted as a guiding principle when walking around RoboBusiness in Silicon Valley last week. The many keynotes, pitches and exhibits in the Santa Clara Convention Center had the buzz of an industry racing towards mass adoption, similar to the early days of personal computing. The inflection point in the invention that changed the world, the PC, was 1995. During that year, Sun Microsystems released Java to developers with promise of "write once, publish anywhere," followed weeks later by Microsoft's consumer software package, Windows '95.

On Wednesday a story about two ex-Google employees receiving an obscene amount of money for a bad idea hit social media and was met with a level of outrage you could feel through the screen. If you're online in any way whatsoever, you likely know I'm talking about Bodega. The excellent article, Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete, hit several raw nerves with a wide range of people. This fury is so crystallized because "Bodega" -- an overfunded, probably doomed, glorified vending machine startup positioned as a bodega killer -- stands for everything Silicon Valley represents to us. Whereas in reality, the very concept of a bodega stands for the absolute opposite of Silicon Valley.

A tech startup called Bodega that hopes to replace mom-and-pop shops with unmanned boxes that rely on an app and artificial intelligence is facing a massive backlash from immigrant business owners and skeptics across Silicon Valley. The company, founded by two former Google employees and launched on Wednesday, is marketing five-foot-wide pantries that users can unlock with their smartphones to pick up non-perishable items. There are no humans at the "stores" – which are already stationed in spots like apartment buildings, offices and gyms – and a computer program automatically charges customers' credit cards, according to Fast Company, which first reported on the startup. Although the boxes appear to be little more than glorified vending machines, the company's executives have been widely mocked, and criticized for explicitly stating that their mission is to displace neighborhood corner stores and put family-owned shops out of business. "The vision here is much bigger than the box itself," co-founder Paul McDonald, a former Google product manager, told Fast Company.