As such, I have a hard time fathoming the cultural and social importance of the Superbowl, even if I can appreciate the fans' fervor and the ever-so-entertaining pageantry taking place every year. It is my understanding that this year's game between the Patriots and the Rams was a particularly dull affair, and that some Chipotle-looking artist took his shirt off and that it was a whole thing. All the memes pages are talking about it. Also the Spongebob Squarepants part of the Internet is rioting. Apart from that, there is little to be said about the main events which are the game and the half-time show.

In 2013, Chieh Huang and others launched Boxed, an online wholesale retailer that quickly grew to over $100 million in annual sales--largely through automation. As the new system was being installed, one line worker asked Huang, "Are you still going to need me when that thing goes live?" The company managed to redeploy everyone and not lose a single staffer. "Automation is great for profits," Huang told Fortune, "but it's a real potential trouble area for society." Forbes estimates that automation can improve productivity by 25-38% and save larger companies millions every year.

We are seeing massive leaps and bounds in technological advances, not only through robotics, artificial intelligence but through nanotechnology as well. Call it what you will, call it Moore's Law, but within 25 years, humans will have a choice whether they want to be enhanced or not. This process will involve neural chipping inside the brain where the possibilities of boosting human intelligence will be limitless. If one reads the literature direct from the source, humans of the future will mould with technology not only physically but mentally. The functions of eating food may not be needed, or breathing air, with nanobots swimming through the body delivering necessary oxygen to cells and repairing any damage or rooting out cancerous cells on a whim.

In 2015, after much research, I wrote about China having 194 robot companies and used screen shots of The Robot Report's Global Map to show where they were and a chart to show their makeup. We've just concluded another research project and have added hundreds of new Chinese companies to the database and global map. China installed 90,000 robots in 2016, 1/3 of the world's total and a 30% increase over 2015. Simply said, China has three drivers helping them move toward country-wide adoption of robotics: scale, growth momentum, and money. Startup companies can achieve scale quickly because the domestic market is so large.

WHO would have thought that a Frisbee-shaped contraption that extracts dust from carpets would be the state of the art in household robots at the dawn of the 21st century? In the past year, Roomba, a circular automatic vacuum cleaner made by a firm called iRobot, has swept up millions of dollars from over 200,000 buyers--and was a must-have at Christmas, among geeks at least. Rival firms such as Electrolux and Karcher sell similar but pricier sweepers. Robot vacuum cleaners, it seems, are catching on. Are these mere playthings, or the beginning of a new trend?

Larry Page wants patients to hand over their data to researchers in order to save "100,000 lives". It's just one of the ideas expressed in a wide-ranging interview at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. But he added that consumers need to accept that a new era of open data is inevitable. Interviewed on the Ted stage by US television host Charlie Rose, Mr Page was asked why Google bought the UK machine learning firm DeepMind. "I was looking at search and trying to understand how to make computers less clunky and also thinking about how speech recognition is not very good," said Mr Page.

Although Hollywood films warn of sentient artificial intelligence looking to overthrow and exterminate its human creators, they're mostly a reason for their big-name stars to jump through the air in slow-motion while dual-wielding rocket-propelled grenade launchers while a hovership explodes behind them. Blinky, on the other hand, paints a much more likely reality of the dangers we may soon face as intelligent robotics become as commonplace as smartphones and voice-activated assistants like Siri. Blinky is a short film written, directed, and edited by Ruairi Robinson. The budget was 45,000 euro (approximately $60K U.S.) for the actual shoot, while the extensive visual effects were done almost entirely by Robinson himself. "Visual effects were completed over a period of 9 months, of hell," says Robinson.

We are in the midst of an extraordinary period of computing platform revolution, a renaissance in artificial intelligence, which is going to change the lives of billions of people around the globe. No other technology is gaining more momentum, seeing more progress--or inciting more fear--than the radical sharpening and rise of intelligence of machines. While the promise of AI has been known for years, the current pace of breakthrough is stunning. Machines are set to reach and exceed human performance on more and more tasks, thanks to advances in dedicated hardware, faster and deeper access to big data, and newer sophisticated algorithms that provide the ability to learn and improve based on feedback. AI has driven crucial progress in fields such as medicine, where it has spurred breakthroughs in disease diagnosis and the development of treatment plans.

Right now, your apples are harvested by humans. But Washington may soon face a shortage of apple pickers: as soon as 2021, according to Washington State University economist Karina Gallardo. The labor pool is shrinking with tougher immigration enforcement and a growing Mexican economy. The solution could be automation - as in robots. But don't expect to see them soon.

We are seeing massive leaps and bounds in technological advances, not only through robotics, artificial intelligence but through nanotechnology as well. Call it what you will, call it Moore's Law, but within 25 years, humans will have a choice whether they want to be enhanced or not. This process will involve neural chipping inside the brain where the possibilities of boosting human intelligence will be limitless. If one reads the literature direct from the source, humans of the future will mould with technology not only physically but mentally. The functions of eating food may not be needed, or breathing air, with nanobots swimming through the body delivering necessary oxygen to cells and repairing any damage or rooting out cancerous cells on a whim.