Just last week Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that he was only worried about the work of one AI company, which many read to be Google. Musk and his fellow worriers should feel a little more at ease to know that Google and DeepMind are thinking about ways to ensure full human control. In an academic paper, DeepMind's Laurent Orseau and Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford have established a framework for interrupting an AI's course of action. "Now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions," reads the paper. Of course, this isn't much use if the clever-clogs AI (shall we just call it Skynet?)

Video game publisher Square Enix has teamed up with a leading bionics company to create prosthetic arms inspired by the Deus Ex series. Open Bionics, which has built Star Wars and Marvel-themed prosthetic limbs for children, is now working on two designs based on the cyberpunk-centric gaming franchise. One (above) will be based on Adam Jensen, the protagonist from the forthcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided game. The other (below) is described as a Deus Ex Universe arm. "We wanted something to touch upon high fashion… something that looks very slick and you could be very proud to wear it," said André Vu, Deus Ex's Executive Brand Director (via Engadget).

Your Xbox One is about to talk back to you, but in a good way -- or at least a slightly better one. Let's clarify, especially for those who bought the Xbox One without Kinect, Microsoft's optional motion-control sensor that's also a microphone into which people can bark voice commands to make things happen. Today's Xbox One is a language desert, a place where you can issue just a few dozen two- or three-word phrases as shorthand for functions you'd otherwise perform by tapping buttons on a gamepad or traditional remote. Tomorrow's Xbox One--which is to say literally this week's Xbox One if you're in the Xbox Preview program, where the feature is due imminently--will let you do that using Cortana. As in Windows Cortana, the semantic voice recognition feature bundled with Windows 10 and named after the fictional artificial intelligence integral to Microsoft's Halo video game franchise.

For as long as computers have been part of our lives, we have interacted with them through touch. We're used to pecking keys, swiping trackpads, and tapping touchscreens to tell a computer we want to open a certain app or visit a specific website. But it is quickly becoming clear we are entering a new phase of digital interaction as technology giants Amazon, Apple, and Google bet on voice-based systems. Mary Meeker, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, dedicated an important portion of her annual presentation on the state of the Web to the rise of voice search. To be sure, the technology has existed for decades and been prevalent for several years.

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.

With features like autocorrect and spell check built into our computers, we can learn how to spell any word almost instantly. But that hasn't stopped us from using Google. Google crunched data from its search engine to put together this map that shows which spellings people search for the most frequently in each state. Several of the terms appear more than once, such as "desert," "cancelled," and "vacuum." The chart coincides with with round four of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which took place on Thursday.

Seeking to catch up to rivals in the realm of voice-controlled services, Apple soon will allow software developers to connect their apps to its Siri digital assistant for the first time, according to a report on Tuesday. Apple also may offer a device similar to the Amazon Echo voice-controlled speaker, according to the report on The Information tech news web site. The report, citing anonymous sources, said Apple will soon release a software development kit allowing other companies to integrate their apps and services with Siri, while the company is still developing the "smart" speaker project. Amazon, by contrast, has partnered with numerous other companies so that owners of its Echo speaker can use the device to call an Uber car, order a Domino's pizza or play music from Spotify. Google last week announced it too would offer a voice-controlled speaker device, dubbed Google Home, that would also be open to third party services.

Overwatch sounds like a game I shouldn't want to play: a hero-focused team shooter that seems aimed at players given to godlike acts of ballistic skill. But I should know better. This is Blizzard we're talking about, after all, a studio that turned a generic fantasy-verse born from a niche real-time strategy game into a global online roleplaying sensation. After chatting with Overwatch co-director Jeffrey Kaplan, I'm almost convinced it's a game for me--the sort of lapsed, Quake-era clanner who has lost interest in competitive shooters. Here, by way of our lightly edited conversation, is a rundown of why.

Justin Gerrard speaks quickly, Brian Gerrard speaks slowly. If you met them separately, you would never guess they were brothers. But their oil-and-water partnership helped them create Bae, a dating app for black people. Bae works pretty much like Tinder, but tailor-made for black users. The Gerrards came up with the idea after they realized how difficult it is for black singles to find dates on existing platforms.

This weekend, I hopped on a train for my annual trek to Maker Faire, held this year at the San Mateo Events Center. Over 150,000 people attended this year's show, coming to check out new drones, 3D printers, robots and more. This particular event is the granddaddy of Maker Faires, started by Maker Media and its visionary founder Dale Dougherty. It bills itself as the greatest "Show and Tell on Earth." I've long been following the Maker Movement as a part of my overall interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.