If California is the political fundraising powerhouse of the nation, Silicon Valley has grown into one of the increasingly dominant forces of campaign cash. And while Northern California tech entrepreneurs overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, a small but powerful group of defectors has moved rightward in recent years. A gathering of tech's conservative cohort enjoyed a visit from former President Trump on Thursday evening at a tony fundraiser held at venture capitalist David Sacks' San Francisco home. The estate, nestled on Billionaires' Row in Pacific Heights, welcomed about 80 elites to the sold-out event. Cost of admission: up to 300,000 per person and 500,000 per couple, according to an invitation obtained by The Times.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Have you ever seen the YouTube video of the young boy at Christmas unwrapping a Nintendo 64 and completely freaking out with excitement? And that kid was me! My peak experiences as a kid always coincided with groundbreaking technology launches.

An example of ML, specifically supervised ML, is the DoD's use of a computer vision algorithm to identify people and objects of interest in surveillance footage. The computer is fed a labeled or tagged dataset, e.g., images of high-profile individuals or armored security vehicles that contain notations of certain physical characteristics. The goal is for the computer's machine learning algorithm to learn these patterns, establish profiles, and be able to accurately identify these individuals or objects once it begins sifting through the footage.

Humans developed technology to serve them and now it threatens their very existence. "Deepfakes" or Deepfake videos are the latest addition to the league of AI-powered advancements that are doing more harm than good. Imagine this: Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, who is theoretically privy to the private data of two billion people, sinisterly claimed in an Instagram video, "I owe it all to Spectre. They showed me whoever controls the data, controls the future." To mimic the appearance of genuine news, the video is framed by broadcast chyrons saying "We're increasing transparency on ads."

The proliferation of robotic warships could make naval warfare safer for human beings. But it also could have the unintended effect of reducing the threshold for military action. Recent events in the Strait of Hormuz underscore that danger. In the summer of 2019 U.S. and Iranian forces each shot down a surveillance drone belonging to the other side, escalating tensions that began with U.S. president Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 deal limiting Iran's nuclear program. "The immediate danger from militarized artificial intelligence isn't hordes of killer robots, nor the exponential pace of a new arms race," Evan Karlik, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, wrote for Nikkei Asian Review.

Unlike in stores or online, where an array of brands get plenty of exposure, voice-search assistants like Amazon.com Inc.'s AMZN -0.66% Alexa often steer shoppers to a single product, usually selected by an algorithm with no input from the sellers. That isn't a big problem now, as voice searches account for a sliver of purchases. In the next five years, half of searches on the web will be done via voice, estimates Sebastien Szczepaniak, a former Amazon executive who now heads e-commerce for Nestlé SA, NSRGY -1.19% the world's biggest packaged-foods company. Consulting firm Capgemini says voice-assistant users will spend 18% of their total expenses via voice assistants in the next three years, up from 3% currently. "Of all the disruptions that are taking place in all the things technology is bringing into our space, voice is among the most disruptive," said Graeme Pitkethly, chief financial officer of Unilever PLC.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a big threat to human beings and machines are going to replace several of us in the future, Alibaba founder and Executive Chairman Jack Ma said at Davos on Wednesday. "The AI, Big Data is a threat to human beings. The AI and robots are going to kill a lot of jobs, because in the future, these will be done by machines," Ma said during a panel discussion during the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. "I think AI should support human beings. Technology should always do something that enables people, not disable people," Ma added.

Weiqi is a 2500-year-old board game from China. In English, the game is called Go. Played on a large square board, with 19*19 squares (chess is 8*8), Go is a two-player game of strategy. Each player tries to win by encircling the other. Given the number of squares and moves, it is believed that there are more moves than atoms in the known universe. The game is complex, and it takes great skill to master.

Recently I watched a 15-second Burger King commercial, which was designed to trigger my voice-activated Google devices. In the ad, a Burger King employee, standing behind a counter at the restaurant, stared into my screen and told me that he didn't have enough time to explain all the "fresh ingredients in the Whopper sandwich." He glanced to the side, suggesting that he was about to let me in on a little secret. Then the camera zoomed in, and in a clear, crisp voice he said, "O.K. Google. What is the Whopper burger?" The video cut to black just as my phone, watch, and Google Home responded to the trigger, reading the first few lines of a Wikipedia entry about the Whopper in an unsynchronized mess of sound.