I can still remember the first time I used Alexa. It's crystal clear in my head: I said, "Alexa, play Take On Me and a few seconds later A-ha's synthy drums kicked in. It was one of the few times in my life that artificial intelligence has left me speechless. It was a real-world version of the technology I grew up seeing in countless science fiction movies and TV shows. Giving that command, I felt like Captain Kirk talking to the computers on the USS Enterprise. I recall wondering where the technology would be in another five or 10 years -- which is roughly where we are right now.

The following is an excerpt adapted from AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Artificial intelligence can perform many tasks better than people can, at essentially zero cost. This simple fact is poised to generate tremendous economic value but also to cause unprecedented job displacement -- a wave of disruption that will hit blue- and white-collar workers alike. In the future, AI will be doing everything from underwriting our loans to building our homes, and even hiring and firing us.

You need to speak with an agent quickly, but everyone is occupied, with lines stretching endlessly. So you go to the robot for help. The robot assistant answers your questions over the course of a genuine, back-and-forth conversation. And despite the noisy environment, it's able to register the stress in your voice -- along with a multitude of other verbal emotional cues -- and modulate its own tone in response. That scenario, laid out by Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals, is still a hypothetical -- but it might be reality sooner than you think. "Within the next five years, you'll see some really amazing experiences come out." "Within the next five years, you'll see some really amazing experiences come out," he said. Gujral isn't in the robotics or chatbot game, but he is in the business of emotion AI: artificial intelligence that detects and analyzes human emotional signals. Emotion AI isn't limited to voice.

Since the advent of the consumer drone (not so long ago, really), making a purchasing decision around new flying machine has involved weighing a list of compromises. You're going to have a big drone that's tough to maneuver. Your footage will look like garbage. Want something easy to fly? You're getting a glorified toy that will fall apart in a light breeze. DJI, the world's leading manufacturer of consumer drones, tried to solve this last year with the Mavic Pro.

Foregoing a good night's sleep may wreck the brain's ability to make new memories. A new study from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine demonstrated that a key purpose of sleep is to recalibrate the brain cells responsible for learning and memory, solidifying lessons learned for when the sleeper is awake. Using a mouse model, the researchers discovered several important molecules that govern the recalibration process, as well as evidence that sleep deprivation, sleep disorders and sleeping pills can interfere with the process. Graham Diering, Ph.D., the postdoctoral fellow who led the study, explained that the results from the mouse study can be used to make determinations about the human brain. "Our findings solidly advance the idea that the mouse and presumably the human brain can only store so much information before it needs to recalibrate," he said in a statement.