Last weekend, I saw my first Christmas ad. And what a Smart Christmas it will be, judging by the haul on offer. Over the past year, companies have been teasing the various connected must-haves for the holidays: bots that can respond to kids' questions and movements, and capture audio and video; an imitation smartwatch that chats with other devices over Bluetooth; not to mention the Barbie Hello Dreamhouse, a pink-and-white smart house for the iconic doll. Not everyone is excited about the intelligence creeping into kids' toys. Privacy activists and developmental psychologists have objected on grounds ranging from security and privacy to fundamental worries about the nature of play.

My name is Josh Pause, and I'm trying to build a machine that can think. Have you ever stopped to ponder just how deliciously absurd that idea is? As a matter of fact, I'm not sure which is more absurd to me: a machine that can think, or, the fact that everyone around me assumes that this machine is both inevitable and destined to rise up and destroy us. These naysayers would have me believe that I am some sort of mad scientist, foolishly chasing my own blind ambitions towards the detriment of mankind. They would have me doubt my own intuition, my own instincts, and my own internal definitions of right and wrong. While we're on the subject of Stanley Kubrick, here's a fun bit of widely-believed trivia: In the late 1960s, NASA went to Stanley Kubrick for help in staging a fake moon landing.

Just months after Microsoft's Tay artificial intelligence sent racist messages on Twitter, another AI seems to have followed suit. More than 6,000 selfies of individuals who live all over the world and range in ages of 18 to 69 were judged by a robot in a beauty contest last week. But when the results came in, there was something missing - it turned out the robots did not like people with dark skin. The Beauty.AI beauty contest put together of robot judges to determine the winners. Beauty.AI used five algorithms to act as judges in a beauty contest.

During the recent Consumer Goods Forum global summit here in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Vivienne about some of the issues confronting the digital disruption of this industry sector. [The original transcript has been edited for clarity and space.] Named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students' life outcomes. Vivienne is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar suffers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Daycamp, and is an advisor to Credit Suisse, Cornerstone Capital, and BayesImpact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Every once in a while I have the opportunity to discuss wide-ranging topics with an intellect that stimulates, is passionate and really cares about the bigger picture. Those opportunities are more rare than one would think. Although set in a somewhat unexpected venue (the elite innards of consumer capitalism) her observations on the inescapable disruption that the new wave of modern technologies are prescient and thoughtful. Ed: In a continent where there is a large focus on putting people to work, how do you see the challenges and disruptions resulting from AI, robotics, IoT, VR and other technologies playing out? These technologies, as did other disruptive technologies before them, tend to replace human workers with machine processes. Vivienne: There is almost no domain in which artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation will not have a profound and positive impact. Medicine, farming, transportation, etc. will all benefit. There will be a huge impact on human potential, and human work will change. I think this is inevitable, that we are well on the way to this AI-enabled future.

In the never-ending search for the real Sasquatch, a man believes he has captured footage of a Bigfoot sighting in Southeast Idaho. The drone video taken by a resident shows what appears to be a hairy, two-legged creature running across a clearing before entering a wooded area and disappearing. The footage was shot near the Hawkins Reservoir west of Downey in Southeast Idaho. The reservoir is located approximately 35 miles south of Pocatello. Sasquatch, is that you?: The drone video taken by a resident in Southeast Idaho shows what appears to be a hairy creature running across a clearing before entering a wooded area and disappearing At around 25 seconds into the two-minute video, the figure can faintly be seen running through the grass.

We are about to see a black hole for the first time ever, scientists hope. A team of scientists are hope to use a computer algorithm and a range of equipment to take the first ever picture of a black hole's event horizon next year. The picture will be taken by a project called Event Horizon Telescope – a network of nine radio telescopes placed all around the world. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

Creators of the popular game revealed this week that Minecraft has now been sold more than 100 million times – and a few copies have even made it to Antarctica. The figures combine sales from PC, console, and mobile versions of the game to create a user-base that'includes folks from every country and territory on the planet.' Creators of the popular game revealed this week that Minecraft has now been sold more than 100 million times – and a few copies have even made it to Antarctica. The figures combine sales from PC, console, and mobile versions of the game to create a user-base that'includes folks from every country and territory on the planet' Minecraft was created in 2009. At the start of the game, a player is put into a'virtually infinite game world.'

If you still think Minecraft is a PC game--well, you're flat wrong. According to new numbers released by Mojang and Microsoft, the original version for the PC is the least popular platform, in almost every region worldwide. Microsoft said Thursday that Minecraft has sold more than 106,859,714 copies to date across all platforms--which would represent the twelfth most populous nation in the world, right behind Japan. Four copies have even been sold into Antarctica. But if you dig into Microsoft's numbers, they reveal that far, far more users are buying Minecraft on platforms other than the PC.

Okay, so Minecraft was already kinda-sorta the second-bestselling game of all time if you don't count Wii Sports, which was a pack-in, and I'm loathe to count stuff you can't buy standalone. But yes, on the basis of conventional video game sales leaderboards, with over 100 million copies (106,859,714 to be precise) across PC, mobile and console in the pocket, Minecraft is now officially second only to that all-time, all-platforms, indefatigable puzzling juggernaut, Tetris. Tetris has something like half a billion on the books if the entrepreneurial math here is right. So there's probably no way Minecraft is going to beat that, probably ever. But consider the next-bestselling game (excluding Wii Sports) is Grand Theft Auto V, with an impressive but presumably now creeping 65 million copies.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon's Jeff Bezos is a Star Trek-loving space geek, but unlike Elon Musk, he's got no plans on for heading to Mars. People haven't really thought this through," he said. Bezos spent 45 minutes in a convivial public conversation at the Washington Post's Transformers Conference in Washington D.C., which was also webcast live. He was interviewed by Martin Baron, executive editor of the Post, which he bought in 2013. After a few jokes about whether or not he'd have a job when the conversation was done, Baron asked Bezos about Amazon's Echo device and its cloud-based voice recognition agent Alexa. The Echo got more competition Wednesday in Mountain View, Calif. Amazon's CEO said the original inspiration for the Echo was the talking computers of Star Trek. While the Echo team is still quite a ways away from reaching that goal, he didn't feel too badly because after all, Star Trek was set more than 250 years in the future. "We still have a couple of centuries, but I don't think we'll need that much time," Bezos said. Bezos said he grew up playing pretend Star Trek every day with his friends when he was in fourth grade in Houston. "We would fight over who got to be Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock, and somebody played the computer too.