LOS ANGELES - This week we dived into everything from the potential dark side of artificial intelligence, to making sense of Twitter's soon-to-change 140 character limits on the #TalkingTech podcast. I ranted about Uber's ever-increasing surge pricing, and offered recommendations on how to deal with them, and talked to folks from Dell Computer about how Sony used 40 of their super-PCs to animate scenes in the new Angry Birds movie. These powerful machines could render a 30 second scene in an hour that would take 18 years on a standard computer, Dell insisted. For our longform fans, our Weekend Listen collection starts with the popularity of the connected speaker, like Amazon's Echo and coming soon, Google Home. How do we feel about having our kitchen conversations monitored?

The ability of video games to entrance people for hours on end have made them the stars of Sony's balance sheet. Now, the company's embattled film studio is hoping a movie based on a mobile game can change the score at the box office. Rovio Entertainment's "Angry Birds" was released in 2009 and has since been downloaded more than 3 billion times, but seven years is a long time in the world of pop culture. Sony Pictures Entertainment hopes there's still enough magic in the video game to make it the foundation of a true and much-needed children's film franchise for a studio still reeling from a high-profile computer hacking incident and some tepid recent movies. But Sony's been on a hot streak with its console gaming business, and it may be a game-based film that has enough worldwide appeal to reset its box office performance.