Ideas forum TED ended its year by picking its top 10 TED Talks for the year, and we'll start 2017 off by selecting a handful of techie ones we figure might be of particular interest to Network World readers. These talks, published during 2016, touch on subjects ranging from AI to the Blockchain to Linux (as discussed by Linus Torvalds himself). One nice thing about the TED YouTube channel is that videos are now captioned, so yes, you can digest these videos even when you're not in a position to actually listen to them... Among other things we learn that Torvalds really likes to work alone, maybe with the exception of his cat hanging out on his lap. Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris describes how "The gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us."