No one wants to be falsely accused of saying or doing something that will destroy their reputation. Even more nightmarish is a scenario where, despite being innocent, the fabricated "evidence" against a person is so convincing that they are unable to save themselves. Yet thanks to a rapidly advancing type of artificial intelligence (AI) known as "deepfake" technology, our near-future society will be one where everyone is at great risk of having exactly that nightmare come true. Deepfakes -- or videos that have been altered to make a person's face or body appear to do something they did not in fact do -- are increasingly used to spread misinformation and smear their targets. Political, religious and business leaders are already expressing alarm by the viral spread of deepfakes that maligned prominent figures like former US President Donald Trump, Pope Francis and Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

CES 2022 will put the spotlight on electric vehicles, digital health, the metaverse and other hot technologies when the trade show officially opens on Wednesday. But the resurgent Covid-19 pandemic threatens to overshadow the innovations on display. CES 2022 officially runs Jan. 5-7, but preshow media events begin on Monday. The upcoming show will be a hybrid event with an in-person conference in Las Vegas along with an online component for those who can't attend the physical show. On Friday, organizers shortened the physical show by one day.

Over the next four days, CES 2017 will be a gold mine for the hospitality industry, said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association. "Hotels are one of the areas I think most ripe for innovation and for change," he said. "You have long-lived capital assets, hotels that last 50-60 years, but technology that's changing rapidly every single year." Wynn Las Vegas set the tone last month for the types of technology trends the industry might see going forward by announcing that all 4,748 guest rooms at Wynn Las Vegas and Encore will be equipped with Amazon Echo -- Amazon's artificial intelligence device -- by this summer. Speaking Wednesday on CES 2017 tech trends to a packed room of about 500 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, DuBravac said voice recognition and artificial intelligence will be a a recurring theme on the show floor.

New advances in speech recognition technology are reshaping the way humans interact with machines and revolutionizing how our devices are built and connected. This so-called "new voice of computing" was one of the "Tech Trends to Watch" presented on Tuesday at CES. Speaking to an audience of several hundred journalists, Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, the U.S. trade association responsible for organizing CES, gave an overview of the history of computing and how voice recognition will impact its future. "The next computer interface is voice. Vocal computing is replacing the graphical user interface," he said. DuBravac mentioned companies that are building products based on voice recognition on top of already established platforms, such as Amazon's Alexa.