If the battle between rival digital assistants can be summed up by the NBA championships, then Google's take would be the Golden State Warriors? That's assuming, of course, the record-setting Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to defend their NBA title. It's the analogy used by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who characterized the competition as more friendly than bloody. "This is not like'Game of Thrones,'" he said Wednesday at Recode's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. Artificial intelligence is already a hot topic at the conference, and it's a big part of Google's future.

In the future, you probably won't use your keyboard to get to this website. So predicts of one of the internet's top oracles, Mary Meeker, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. On Wednesday Meeker, a long time investor and financial analyst, unveiled her annual predictions of the technology industry's future at a conference in southern California. The two big takeaways: people will do more talking to their computers and less typing on them. Oh – and the technology sector's days of easy, red-hot growth may be behind it because an increasing percentage of the Earth's population already owns a smartphone.

"If we can do it in the right and thoughtful way we are always open to it," said Pichai at the Code conference here. "I care about serving consumers everywhere." Google pulled out of mainland China and moved its Chinese-language search engine to Hong Kong in 2010 after a series of cyber attacks on Google originated in the country. Google also said it would stop censoring search results in China. The controversial move cut Google off from the fast-growing Chinese market, one that's been courted by rival Facebook and constitutes the second-biggest market for Apple.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Killer robots pose a threat to all of us. In the movies, this threat is usually personified as an evil machine bent on destroying humanity for reasons of its own. In reality, the threat comes from within us.

In-home robots to help with everything from cooking and cleaning to childcare and companionship have been the stuff of sci-fi for decades. But, with the unveiling this week of the Wall-E-like Asus Zenbo, this is the year that science-fiction could turn into science-fact, introducing home assistants that can talk to you, control your electronics and help out with the chores. Here are five that could be knocking at your door in the near future. The latest robot to offer help around the home is Asus's Zenbo, which, at 599 ( 410), costs about the same as a smartphone. Designed to be a do-it-all smarthome assistant, Zenbo can drive itself around your place, using various cameras to keep it from bumping into the walls.

"Warcraft," a fantasy epic based on the popular video game series, is opening in China next weekend, and it may already spell "game over" for any movie that dares to compete with it. The little-hyped movie, produced by Legendary Entertainment and distributed by Universal Pictures, may not even clear 100 million in the U.S. And yet, based on the reliable proxy of internet presales, it is on pace to top "Furious 7" as the highest-grossing Hollywood film ever in China. Either way, it will be a nice win for Legendary's parent company -- the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group -- in its burgeoning rivalry with the Walt Disney Company, whose movies have dominated Middle Kingdom multiplexes for months. Chinese film fans love Disney's animated fare and its Marvel superhero movies, but based on presale numbers for "Warcraft," they might love video games more. Despite being released in just 20 countries so far -- mostly in Europe -- "Warcraft has already reeled in about 31.6 million, according to comScore.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Alphabet's Boston Dynamics has produced some of the coolest (and scariest) robotics advances in recent years, and now may soon be looking for a new home. According to Nikkei Asian Review, Toyota is in "final talks" to acquire two robotics divisions from Google-parent Alphabet, Boston Dynamics and Schaft, a company created by two former Tokyo University professors. Both divisions were acquired by Google in 2013. The move will allow Toyota to strengthen its artificial intelligence division, the Toyota Research Institute, that the automaker created in January. The institute currently has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., not far from Boston Dynamics main headquarters in Waltham.

At first glance, 'intent to leave' seems like it should be pretty good predictor of turnover. If a coworker told me that they were going to quit, I feel like I'd have a pretty good sense of how likely they were to leave. However, many researchers have developed constructs to measure this intention and the results are surprising. For example, there was a meta-analytic study (i.e., study of studies) in 2000 by Rodger Griffeth and Peter Hom on turnover that found the construct'intent to leave' had a shared variance with actually leaving of 12% across all studies (explains roughly 12% of why people leave). That's pretty good for a study on human behavior, but it does leave a reader wondering what is going on.

Toyota is close to acquiring two robotics companies from Google, according to a report in Wednesday's Nikkei newspaper. The newspaper said the two companies are in final talks, but details are yet to be discussed so the deal could still fall through. The deal would see Boston Dynamics, a developer of advanced two- and four-legged robots for the U.S. military, and Schaft, a Tokyo-based developer of humanoid robots, transferred to the Toyota Research Institute. The unit is a recently launched billion-dollar research arm based in Silicon Valley. Google acquired Boston Dynamics and Schaft several years ago as part of a push into robotics, but that hasn't gone anywhere since robotics head Andy Rubin left the company in late 2014.