You don't need a STEM background to make it in Silicon Valley. In fact, one of the most desirable skill sets these days in the tech capital of America has seemingly little to do with technology. So for all you struggling artists waxing poetic (literally), starve no more -- instead, you may want to consider making not a career change, but a change in scenery. As virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana grow in popularity, so too must their communication skills. And those skills have to come from humans who are particularly gifted in the realm of language.

On this week's Slate Culture Gabfest, the gabbers discuss Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater's spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. Is it an anthropological study of the male pecking order, a fun time with some charming jocks, or both? Next up, the gabbers and Slate's senior technology writer Will Oremus interview "Alexa," the voice of Amazon Echo, and weigh in on the utility of anthropomorphized domestic artificial intelligence. Finally, Slate Culture Editor Dan Kois joins to reopen the debate over the Mount Rushmore of American culture. Will your favorite artists make the cut?

If you've seen the movie Her, or perhaps Iron Man, you'll know what the future of tech looks like. AI is coming and it's coming in a big way. It's here to make our lives easier and simpler, or at least, that's what all the big tech giants would have us believe. AI is nothing new, IBM has been experimenting with Watson for a couple of years. But powerful, enormous tech such as Watson is far removed from the lives of everyday people like you or me.

A real life assistant is expected to be a jack-of-all-trades. Whether finding a room for my meeting (and knowing how important the other meetings are to determine who else I can kick out), or booking me a cab back from my event (and knowing that I'd rather leave early to avoid the rush than see the whole thing but have to hang around afterwards); genuine intelligence is absolutely required, as is flexibility and persistence. Which is why digital assistants have been unmitigated failures. Predictive search makes me feel like I'm living in the future. But it's hard not to feel like we've been sold an over-reaching dream: a digital assistant that can look after my life's admin for me.

While voice-recognition-powered virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Amazon's Echo continue to get more useful and reliable on the march to platform-dom, there is a parallel wave of development underway that has captured the public eye, where machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing are getting corralled for more narrowly purposed means -- by way of bots. Today, a New York-based startup called X.ai -- which has developed a bot that helps you arrange meetings with other people by way of a virtual assistant ('Amy' or'Andrew') -- announced that it has raised 23 million. The Series B funding will be used to take X.ai from a closed and free beta to a commercial product, and the startup also plans to hire more data scientists and other engineers. X.ai is not releasing details of its valuation, but we understand from reliable sources that it is now around 100 million -- a decent jump on the 40 million valuation the company had when it announced its Series A of 9 million in January 2015. The funding is being led by Two Sigma Ventures, with other new investors including DCM Ventures and Work Bench Ventures.

There's an Echo in Best Buy (and in a quantity greater than one). Tech Times reports that Amazon Echo, the voice-enabled, at-home assistant (whose own voice has a name, of course, and that name is Alexa), has made its way to Best Buy shelves (as well as to the retailer's website). It's been a bit of a long wait for Amazon Echo to connect with the major tech retailer, especially considering that the popular robo-helper has been available from chains, including Staples, Home Depot, Sears and others, going back to the winter holidays. According to Best Buy's website (as Tech Times points out), it is offering the device at the same price point as Amazon itself does -- 179.99 -- with quantities in stock and ready to ship in a day or two. So, any Best Buy loyalists who had been holding out until their preferred chain could avail them of the opportunity to ask Alexa to order them a pizza or a ride (to name just two of Amazon Echo's growing list of capabilities) can, at long last, do so. As for Amazon Echo's sibling products -- the battery-powered, portable Amazon Tap and the Echo Dot, a bridge device that connects to Amazon's web of services -- Tech Times reports that the Tap is expected to hit Best Buy stores (and site) later this month, while no such timeline has been announced for the Dot as of yet.

You can call it a Virtual Personal Assistant, an Intelligent Agent, an Intelligent Interface or whatever you wish. The era of the assistant that began with Siri will eventually dominate the way people interact with mobile devices, computers, cars, wearables, appliances and every other piece of technology that requires complex human-machine interaction. Nearly all of the large Internet players have now launched or are working on some effort to win this next-generation paradigm and it's the earliest of days. Despite the massive uptake of assistants spurred by Apple's Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana, the market and technologies for this paradigm remain in their adolescence. Siri was the first chapter in a much longer, larger story that reminds me of the original iPhone launch in 2007.

Turns out a "useless" humanities degree can get you a job in Silicon Valley, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. The brains behind Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana realized that to make their AIs sound more like people, they needed to hire workers whose creativity was less digital and more personal. According to the Washington Post, the teams behind many everyday AIs are made up of poets, writers, and comedians, who help give the robots more personality. Now, we're not saying that Silicon Valley's tech community is full of sociopaths or psychos, but software companies seem to have realized that hiring engineers from fields outside their own can help make their AI's more personable, and it's a much easier way to teach computers to think than turning them loose on the internet, which inevitably turns them into racists. Some companies are taking artificial assistants one step further.

Next time you schedule a meeting and an assistant named Amy or Andrew Ingram sets up the logistics, here's a pro tip: You may be chatting with a robot. And if it's one of x.ai's bots, you might never know the difference. That was my experience when I exchanged emails with "Andrew" to set up an interview with x.ai's CEO. After I emailed x.ai's press contact, she referred me to Andrew to hammer out the details. Andrew proposed a time, thanked me when I accepted and sent out a calendar invitation.

NOT since the era of imperial Rome has the "thumbs-up" sign been such a potent and public symbol of power. A mere 12 years after it was founded, Facebook is a great empire with a vast population, immense wealth, a charismatic leader, and mind-boggling reach and influence. The world's largest social network has 1.6 billion users, a billion of whom use it every day for an average of over 20 minutes each. In the Western world, Facebook accounts for the largest share of the most popular activity (social networking) on the most widely used computing devices (smartphones); its various apps account for 30% of mobile internet use by Americans. And it is the sixth-most-valuable public company on Earth, worth some 325 billion.