I'm John Betcher with Chris Regal, the CEO of Scholar.com, a global technology firm out on business on all the continents, which is why I depend on Chris's eyes and ears, because he travels widely.

And his firm is involved in all manner of franchises successful around the world, which is a way of measuring not only the American

economy, but that of our allies and the unknowns. That would be the People's Republic of China.

Chris, a very good day to you. The scholar report now begins a new year asking after the CES.

That is at Las Vegas, and it's a collection of the dreaming future. This year, I understand the dreaming future is robots. What does it look like?

What does it like to participate in a CES where you have R2D2s wandering the corridors. Good evening, too.

Good evening, John. CES is always an amazing experience to be able to see all of the both cool,

crazy, and wacky ideas that the tech industry will bring forward. The major themes of CES this

year are certainly focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, autonomous systems.

But there's always some very fun things like robots to fold your laundry or new types of devices, vehicles, etc.

But always an exciting experience.

There was a year, as I i recall where it was dominated by drones

you had to be careful that you didn't get clipped when you turned a corner so that was then this is now

these robots the pictures that i've seen i'm not seen many of them in motion they look like toys

it looks like a really cool gift for christmas when you run out of ideas for your teenagers. Are they more than that?

So, John, you have the basic utilitarian robots that might fold your laundry or sweep your floors, but you're also seeing advances in more advanced robotics that can replace human tasks, would that be in

assembly or firefighting or other potentially either repetitive or dangerous tasks? But there's

certainly the continued merger between artificial intelligence as a capability and the ability

to learn tasks and execute tasks and the robotics

as the execution arm. So you're starting to see much, much more progressive marriage between

those two disciplines and how that could potentially change the economic future in the country.

I did not anticipate that those drone years at the Consumer Electronics Symposium,

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