On my way back from Singapore a few weeks ago, I had the chance to watch an interesting TED Talk about robots taking human jobs. It got me thinking: What would happen if robots and machines took over? Would they take every job imaginable, or just take over a few industries? Will your job become obsolete as machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to ebb into even the most mundane tasks of our daily lives? My perspective is that machines and robots will make our lives easier, but not take everyone's jobs.

Today, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how individuals will interact with its various forms. Every single aspect of our society -- from cars to houses to products to services -- will be reimagined and redesigned to incorporate A.I. A child born in the year 2030 will not comprehend why his or her parents once had to manually turn on the lights in the living room. In the future, the smart home will seamlessly know the needs, wants, and habits of the individuals who live in the home prior to them taking an action. Before we arrive at this future, it is helpful to take a step back and reimagine how we design cars, houses, products, and services. We are just beginning to see glimpses of this future with the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart voice assistants.

Google's Pixel and Pixel XL have finally landed and both come with the fantastic Google Assistant. The AI software is like Siri, but much smarter. It uses a so-called smart reply feature to offer what Google calls "appropriate, contextually aware smart suggestions for quick replies" and it learns how you prefer to reply, in order to tailor the responses to make them more personal. This includes adding more options in the predictive text replies, or making more of spoken replies. When you first set up your Pixel phone, you will be prompted to enable Google Assistant and it will guide you through registering your voice for the "OK Google" command.

Today, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how individuals will interact with its various forms. Every single aspect of our society -- from cars to houses to products to services -- will be reimagined and redesigned to incorporate A.I. A child born in the year 2030 will not comprehend why his or her parents once had to manually turn on the lights in the living room. In the future, the smart home will seamlessly know the needs, wants, and habits of the individuals who live in the home prior to them taking an action. Before we arrive at this future, it is helpful to take a step back and reimagine how we design cars, houses, products, and services. We are just beginning to see glimpses of this future with the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart voice assistants.

Google first announced Allo and Duo, its new messaging and video chat apps, at its I/O developer conference earlier this year. Duo launched about a month ago and today it's Allo's turn. With Allo, Google is combining everything it has learned from its previous messaging products with the company's machine learning smarts. Indeed, Allo marks the first time you'll be able to use the Google Assistant, the company's more conversational version of Google Now that will also soon find its way into products like Google Home, Android Wear and others. Given that Google already owns Hangouts, a messaging service that also includes video chat, the obvious question here is why the company would launch another one.