The Economist recently published an irreverent piece about the one of the latest advancements in AI technology: assembling IKEA furniture. "Now that machines have mastered one of the most baffling ways of spending a Saturday afternoon," the magazine joked, "can it be long before AIs rise up and enslave human beings in the silicon mines?" Kidding aside, the article goes on to note that not only did these Singapore-based researchers train a robot to take care of a task that most of us would more than happily hand off, but that when it came down to brass tacks, the robot didn't actually perform the task all that well. "It took a pair of [IKEAbots], pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time." Personally, I'd happily let the robot work at its own pace if it meant I didn't have to bother with a bunch of Allen keys and Swedish instructions.

We often become so obsessed with the portrayal of personal investing as a product or extension of technology that we forget that wealth management is, at its core, a profession rooted in personal relationships. Truly gifted advisors understand wholeheartedly that a client relationship is an ongoing dynamic interaction where the portfolio often is no more than the present tense of multigenerational well-being, purpose and aspiration. Emotions are an integral part of a human existence. When I sit down with clients I seek to understand each facet of their behavioral dynamics, as it is irresponsible (and ultimately ineffective) to recommend and defend a customized wealth strategy without this fulcrum of relevance. Countless studies have depicted the relationships and ambiguities that intertwine emotional stability and financial security.

Artificial Intelligence is a curse and a blessing, depending on what angle you look at it from. On the one hand, the technology firepower AI brings to the table can be extremely useful, like powering our virtual assistants, smart cars, smart homes and so on; but on the other hand, the evolving nature of AI could keep eating into our jobs in a big way. According to Kai-Fu Lee, a venture capitalist, and one of the very few tech minds who has the distinction of working at all three major tech companies – Apple, Microsoft and Google – robots are likely to replace 50% of all jobs in the next decade. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the wave of the future, the influential technologist told CNBC, calling it the "singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet -- because AI is pervasive." He also added that AI will create a huge amount of wealth for mankind, and wipe out poverty in the process. AI will, of course, improve a lot of things that we do.

In the race to the autonomous revolution, developers have realized there aren't enough hours in a day to clock the real-world miles needed to teach cars how to drive themselves. Which is why Grand Theft Auto V is in the mix. The blockbuster video game is one of the simulation platforms researchers and engineers increasingly rely on to test and train the machines being primed to take control of the family sedan. Companies from Ford Motor Co. to Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo may boast about putting no-hands models on the market in three years, but there's a lot still to learn about drilling algorithms in how to respond when, say, a mattress falls off a truck on the freeway. If automakers and tech enterprises want to make their deadline, they have to hurry up.