Matt Krisiloff is in a small, glass-walled conference room off the lobby of Y Combinator's office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, shouting distance from some of the country's wealthiest startups, many of which Y Combinator has nurtured and helped fund. Krisiloff, who manages the operations of the tech incubator's program for very early-stage companies, is explaining why it is committed to investing an amount said to be in the tens of millions of dollars in a venture that is guaranteed never to make a penny. It's the simplest business model conceivable: hand thousands of dollars over to individuals in return for nothing, no strings attached. Krisiloff insists he and his Y Combinator colleagues can't wait to get started giving away the money. "This could be really transformative," he says. "It may help change how humans, society, and technology all operate together in the future."

Bibhrajit Halder left the Midwest and a job developing autonomous trucks for Caterpillar Inc. about a year and a half ago to join Ford Motor Co. in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the auto maker is working on self-driving vehicles. The Dearborn, Mich., auto maker, however, soon lost the software engineer to Faraday Future Inc., an electric-car startup luring auto industry veterans with Silicon Valley-like perks including stock options, free health care, catered lunches and foosball tables. "The work is exciting," Mr. Halder said in an interview about six months after joining Faraday, where he says he has more responsibility than at the blue chip companies he left. "The company is dependent on you to deliver." Ford is at the center of a ferocious hiring battle now pitting traditional car makers against startups out to force a shift to electric and autonomous-driving vehicles.

Bibhrajit Halder left the Midwest and a job developing autonomous trucks for Caterpillar Inc. CAT -1.46 % about a year and a half ago to join Ford Motor Co. F -1.21 % in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the auto maker is working on self-driving vehicles. The Dearborn, Mich., auto maker, however, soon lost the software engineer to Faraday Future Inc., an electric-car startup luring auto industry veterans with Silicon Valley-like perks including stock options, free health care, catered lunches and foosball tables. "The work is exciting," Mr. Halder said in an interview about six months after joining Faraday, where he says he has more responsibility than at the blue chip companies he left. "The company is dependent on you to deliver."

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3, will be prefaced by Bethesda Softworks and Electronic Arts press conferences Sunday, but a lot of news has already leaked ahead of the big event. Several big games have been revealed, and rumblings about new Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony video game consoles have been swelling for months. Based on the rumors, E3 2016 at the Los Angeles Convention Center June 14-16 is shaping up to be a fascinating event that could have a great effect on the video game industry. Nothing gets gamers' blood flowing like a good console unveiling. E3 is the place where consoles are launched, which is why 2016 is an odd year in the event's history.

Apart from its Russian engines, the J-20 is completely made and designed in China. And even then, future J-20s will be flying with a more powerful domestic engine, the WS-15, by 2021. In line with its increasingly sophisticated domestic arsenal, China's arms exports have become much more technically competitive in the last ten years; the 2015 U.S. Defense Department's Annual Report on the PLA even stated that China's ground systems in particular are globally competitive or nearly globally competitive. With selling points of low cost and affordable service, lack of geopolitical strings and upgrade packages, China has become the world's third largest arms exporter behind the US and Russia. With a series of recent contracting wins against Russian firms, it looks to expand its market share.

The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly -- in every sense of the word -- and we need to start to change it," Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.

At the upscale Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, people are taking selfies with a roving robot that looks like a cross between Wall-E's girlfriend and R2D2. It's actually a K5 robot security guard--a 300-pound, sensor-filled droid made by a startup called Knightscope that patrols the area and detects suspicious behavior. K5 is part of a small but growing number of human-scale mobile robots that are finding employment outside the confines of industrial settings like factories. They're invading consumer spaces including retail stores, hotels, and sidewalks in a quest to deliver services alongside human staff members for a fraction of the price of employing people to do a variety of typically unexciting tasks. The machines come with navigation capabilities and safety features to allow them to perform simple jobs autonomously without putting people at risk.

I'm hanging out with my 4-year-old daughter in the early evening, trying to keep her entertained and pull dinner together, when my phone buzzes. Normally I'd feel guilty for checking it immediately, and distracted even if I didn't. It's a timely suggestion from an app called Muse. Here's what it says: "Try playing'Simon Says' with L,. using directional words like: behind, around, between. 'Simon Says stand between the chairs.')" I can even call out the commands while chopping vegetables.

The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly -- in every sense of the word -- and we need to start to change it," Obermann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and other tech giants are all building their own "bots" that utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are a bevy of other startups doing the same, developing conversational technology that can help humans with everyday tasks. But one small company out of Palo Alto, Calif. is building a virtual assistant that it believes is differentiated and special -- and some top investors seem to agree. Ozlo is a new Silicon Valley startup that last month reeled in 14 million investment round from Greylock and AME Cloud Ventures, a fund started by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. It also just opened its first remote office in Seattle and plans to move into a permanent location next month, with room for up to 25 employees.