Boston Dynamics has racked up hundreds of millions of YouTube views with viral clips of its futuristic, legged robots dancing together, doing parkour, and working in a warehouse. A group of meme-spinning pranksters now wants to present a more dystopian view of the company's robotic tech. They added a paintball gun to Spot, the company's doglike machine, and plan to let others control it inside a mocked-up art gallery via the internet later this week. The project, called Spot's Rampage, is the work of MSCHF (pronounced "mischief," of course), an internet collective that regularly carries out meme-worthy pranks. Previous MSCHF stunts include creating an app that awarded $25,000 to whomever could hold a button down for the longest; selling "Jesus Shoes" sneakers with real holy water in the soles (Drake bought a pair); developing an astrology-based stock-picking app; and cutting up and selling individual spots from a Damian Hirst painting.

Google has fired one of its top artificial intelligence researchers, Margaret Mitchell, escalating internal turmoil at the company following the departure of Timnit Gebru, another leading figure on Google's AI ethics team. Mitchell, who announced her firing on Twitter, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a statement to Reuters, Google said the firing followed a weeks-long investigation that found she moved electronic files outside the company. Google said Mitchell violated the company's code of conduct and security policies. Google's ethics in artificial intelligence research unit has been under scrutiny since December's dismissal of Gebru, a prominent Black researcher in Silicon Valley.

With every new generation of consoles and components, video games grow closer and closer to replicating reality. From the glistening sweat on star athletes' faces in sports franchises like "Madden" and "NBA 2K," to the soft swaying of grass in samurai thriller "Ghost of Tsushima," game-makers are always leveraging the latest in granular detail to sell the immersive power of the medium. Tristan Cooper, who owns the Twitter account "Can You Pet the Dog?," never set out to create a social media juggernaut. Rather, he was just trying to point out what he felt was a common quirk of many high-profile games: While many featured dogs, wolves and other furry creatures as hostile foes of the protagonist, those that did feature cuddly animal friends rarely let you pet them. Cooper says the account was particularly inspired by his early experience with online shooter "The Division 2." "'The Division 2′s' apocalyptic streets were rife with frightened dogs that you could not console or help in any way," he wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

The idea of chatbots based on dead people raises several ethical questions surrounding privacy. People only share so much on social media, so algorithms relying on that would be flawed. Humans are also highly complex and influenced by experiences that aren't always shared via text messages. Microsoft's patent suggests that the company could use crowdsourced data to fill in any gaps. In other words, the resulting chatbot could end up saying things the person never said.

Apple is facing our face-masked future. This week, the company started testing some new software for the iPhone that will let device owners unlock the handset while wearing a face covering. There's a catch though, one that lines up with Apple's strategy of locking people in to different Apple products and highlights how challenging it can be to develop accurate facial recognition technology: The new face-unlock feature requires an Apple Watch. The first developer beta of iOS 14.5 includes updates to app tracking controls and Siri alongside the face-mask function. App-makers typically get early access to the newest version of iOS in order to launch or retool their apps well in advance of the formal software release. The fully-baked version of the software is expected to be made available to the general public this spring.

New York (CNN Business)Disinfectant gadgets, next-generation fitness equipment and robots that help you cook dinner. Those are a few of the countless new products expected to be unveiled next week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual splashy tech conference that typically sets the tone for the biggest trends of the year. Home automation, health and 5G will once again be buzzy topics, but many companies will also introduce pandemic-specific features to reflect our increased time at home. Each year, reporters, exhibitors and investors typically explore Las Vegas showrooms filled with giant TVs, smart cars and robots fixing martinis, but CES will be online only for the first time in its 54-year history due to Covid-19. The Consumer Electronics Association, the nonprofit behind the four-day event starting Monday, said 1,800 exhibitors from around the world will fill its "digital venue" this year -- a number that's down significantly from 4,000 in-person exhibitors last year.

Security cameras and facial recognition technology are on the rise in China. In 2018, People's Daily, the media mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party, claimed on English-language Twitter that the country's facial recognition system was capable of scanning the faces of China's 1.4 billion citizens in just one second. German journalist Kai Strittmatter speaks fluent Mandarin and has studied China for more than 30 years. He says it's not clear whether or not the Chinese government is capable of using facial recognition software in the way it claims. But he adds, on a certain level, the veracity of the claim isn't important.

New York (CNN Business)Longstanding speculation that Apple will release its own electric, self-driving car was reignited last week when Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that Apple plans to produce a passenger vehicle by 2024. Talk of the iPhone maker's ambitions to break into the auto industry has been swirling for about five years. Expectations for the effort, named Project Titan, range from the company developing its own Apple-branded car to providing operating system software to existing car manufacturers. In April 2017, Apple received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving vehicles there. An Apple car has the potential to be "a transformative event" for the automobile and mobility industry in the coming decades, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors last week -- much as the iPhone changed the game for mobile phones.

So you just got a smart speaker as a holiday present. Now what to do with them? You've come to the right place. On command, by saying "Hey Siri," for the HomePod, "Hey Google" for the Nest Audio or "Alexa," on Echo speakers, you can instruct them to play music of your choice, either via a subscription service, or more generically, as part of a themed radio station via the Pandora service. Amazon's speakers play music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and iHeartRadio, while Apple plays just from Apple Music and Pandora.

Many of the most successful and widely used machine learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people in the US alone earn money each month by doing work on these platforms. Around 250,000 of them earn at least three quarters of their income this way. But despite many working for some of the richest AI labs in the world, they are paid below minimum wage and given no opportunities to develop their skills.