Essential Politics: Details emerge on Legislature hiring Holder, new report on California's housing crisis This is Essential Politics, our daily look at California political and government news. The law firm of Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, has been hired by the California Legislature to defend state policies during the term of President-elect Trump. Rep. Darrell Issa on Wednesday launched a new effort to change the rules of the nation's skilled worker visa program . The law firm of Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, has been hired by the California Legislature to defend state policies during the term of President-elect Trump. Rep. Darrell Issa on Wednesday launched a new effort to change the rules of the nation's skilled worker visa program .

Essential Politics: Details emerge on Legislature hiring Holder, new report on California's housing crisis This is Essential Politics, our daily look at California political and government news. The law firm of Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, has been hired by the California Legislature to defend state policies during the term of President-elect Trump. Rep. Darrell Issa on Wednesday launched a new effort to change the rules of the nation's skilled worker visa program . The law firm of Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, has been hired by the California Legislature to defend state policies during the term of President-elect Trump. Rep. Darrell Issa on Wednesday launched a new effort to change the rules of the nation's skilled worker visa program .

Following the Arkansas hot tub murder case that has reignited the debate around privacy rights issues, activists are advocating the need to set protocols for technology providers to deter mass surveillance by the government and law enforcement agencies. In the Arkansas hot tub murder case, James Andrew Bates is currently on trial. Bates is accused of murdering his friend Victor Collins, who was found dead in a hot tub in Bates' home in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2015. Local authorities issued a warrant as they sought assistance from Amazon to release any audio or records from an Amazon Echo device that Bates owned. Following the footsteps of Apple, who similarly resisted handing over private user data to the FBI when the agency asked the company to unlock the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, Amazon also reportedly declined to give authorities the Echo data logged on its servers.

When Tay started its short digital life on March 23, it just wanted to gab and make some new friends on the net. The chatbot, which was created by Microsoft's Research department, greeted the day with an excited tweet that could have come from any teen: "hellooooooo w rld!!!" Within a few hours, though, Tay's optimistic, positive tone had changed. "Hitler was right I hate the jews," it declared in a stream of racist tweets bashing feminism and promoting genocide. Concerned about their bot's rapid radicalization, Tay's creators shut it down after less than 24 hours of existence. Microsoft had unwittingly lowered their burgeoning artificial intelligence into -- to use the parlance of the very people who corrupted her -- a virtual dumpster fire.

Michio Kaku, a noted theoretical physicist and futurist, predicts, "The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform." Robots have recently entered the legal workplace, performing several tasks once assigned to newly minted law grads. What does this mean for current and future lawyers? Simple answer: robots will not replace lawyers but they will work with them. Technology has already produced a new class of support professionals that work with lawyers -- just as techs work with doctors in healthcare delivery.

"Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature." Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming for your job. But is it coming for your photographer or inventor? The driver-less cars, automated factories, and automated laboratories of today may give way to AI capable of thinking, writing, creating or even diagnosing disease.

If you're a business owner, you know that regulations can be a killer. There's a lot to keep track of, and it's not always easy to stay on top of the regulations. This is especially true of small businesses. You just might not have the time or money to keep up with all the regulations. As it so often does, technology is helping the situation.

A New York City college student is taking internet giants Google, Yahoo! and Bing to court, demanding they delete her name from their search engines because she was the victim of revenge porn. According to the lawsuit, the 30-year-old woman broke up with her boyfriend last year, the New York Post reported. After the end of their three-month relationship, the man uploaded a video onto the internet of the two engaged in sexual acts. The video was secretly recorded by the ex-boyfriend without her knowledge, the lawsuit states. Because the woman is of West African descent, she has a unique four-letter last name, thus search results of her name are limited to the raunchy video.

Galileo viewed nature as a book written in the language of mathematics and decipherable through physics. His metaphor may have been a stretch for his milieu, but not for ours. Ours is a world of digits that must be read through computer science. It is a world in which artificial-intelligence (AI) applications perform many tasks better than we can. Like fish in water, digital technologies are our infosphere's true natives, while we analog organisms try to adapt to a new habitat, one that has come to include a mix of analog and digital components.

Mark Zuckerberg has given more weight to the idea that he could move into politics with the announcement of a statesmanly personal challenge for 2017. In previous years the Facebook CEO has learned Mandarin, pledged to run at least a mile each day and built a virtual assistant called Jarvis to control his home. This year he wants to have visited and met people in every state in the US. He's already visited about 20 states, which means he has to travel to about 30 states by the end of the year. "After a tumultuous last year, my hope for this challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future," he said in a Facebook post announcing the challenge.