Mansour asked Vorhies about Google's business engagements in China. "Google has gotten in trouble in the past for doing business with the Communist government of China," Mansour said. "And I wanted to ask you were those efforts ongoing when you were with the company? Can you give us any insight into that? Because it was quite troubling."

Sharing a name with a famous person can prompt endless jokes and comments -- but in these particularly politically-charged times, having the same name as a political figure can be especially tiresome. That's something a young man from Kentucky named Brett Kavanagh has learned only too well in recent weeks: On Friday, Brett, 27, complained about the recent woes of having his name, prompting others with famous names to commiserate. Women named Siri and Alexa, and men named Michael Jackson and Bruce Lee, all tweeted about how hard it is to have a well-known name. His tweet inspired others to chime in, including this person who pointed to a Scottish man named Steve Bannon -- who is not the same as Breitbart's Steve Bannon A man named Bruce Y. Lee knows the struggle This Brett, who works in customer service and lives in Louisville, spells his last name differently from new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but it seems their nearly-identical names has caused him some trouble. Tough times: Brett (pictured) doesn't spell his name the same way as the judge, either'This is a terrible time to be named Brett Kavanagh,' he tweeted.

CNBC reports that speaking on a panel organized by CNBC at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Ian Pearson of Futurizon commented on the issues that may arise around artificial intelligence. "The fact is that AI can go further than humans, it could be billions of times smarter than humans at this point," said Pearson. "So we really do need to make sure that we have some means of keeping up." Pearson continued, "The way to protect against that is to link that AI to your brain so you have the same IQ… as the computer. I don't actually think it's safe, just like Elon Musk… to develop these superhuman computers until we have a direct link to the human brain… and then don't get way ahead."

According to the Wall Street Journal, the "virtual-reality avatar" named Vivi depicted a "flirtatious secretary in revealing clothes" and was in beta testing for a virtual reality headset created by iQiyi, before the company pulled the assistant just "hours after The Wall Street Journal asked whether such depictions encourage a view of women as sexual objects in the workplace." Vivi was reportedly able to help users with average tasks "via voice commands" but "could also flirt with users and respond to commands to dance," which prompted users online to praise her "sexy dances, with her enchanting figure." Though Vivi was originally created to be an AI girlfriend, the Wall Street Journal reported that "revisions in October placed her in an office setting." Following complaints, iQiyi removed the virtual assistant and released a statement apologizing. "The earlier version of the product is a beta-testing version designed to gather users' feedback," the company claimed.

The futurist and inventor believes that we have no more than "a five to 10 per cent chance" of successfully making artificial intelligence safe enough not to wipe out the human race. Musk seeks a proactive approach to what he sees as a potentially deadly worldwide AI crisis, which means that governments must become well-versed in the concepts before such understanding becomes a matter of life and death. "Normally the way regulations are set up is when a bunch of bad things happen, there's a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry," he said. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization." And Musk is certain that approach will not work for artificially intelligent superweapons: "Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be… By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it'll be too late."

University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio is one of three members of what they have self-titled the "deep learning conspiracy." This "Canadian Mafia" of artificial intelligence visionaries is largely responsible for the tech industry's leap into machine learning. Bengio and his colleagues consult for the companies to which he is referring: Bengio for IBM, with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for Google and Facebook, respectively. These are the companies that can use AI to create even better AI, embarrass China at their oldest game, police Twitter, or give your next iPhone a brain. In responding to a question from an Axios reporter as to whether the tech giants should be broken up, Bengio openly scoffed.

The computer engineer fired by Google for suggesting women are less suited to certain roles in tech and leadership is considering taking legal action against the company. James Damore, a chess master who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT and worked at the search engine's Mountain View HQ in California, caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto at the weekend complaining about Google's "ideological echo chamber" and claiming women have lower tolerance of stress and that conservatives are more conscientious. He was fired on Monday after the search giant's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore's 10-page memo "violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes". Damore has now said he would "likely be pursuing legal action". "I have a right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behaviour, which is what my document does," he said in an email reported by the New York Times. In a further email to the rightwing website Breitbart, he reportedly said: "They just fired me for'perpetuating gender stereotypes'."

Harmony is a prototype, a robotic version of the company's hyper-realistic silicone sex toy, the RealDoll,

We can't stop progress or robots, but we can adopt wise policies that maximize both supply and demand for human capital, encouraging employers to pay the best price for high-quality labor. Right now, we're trying to force them to pay more than the labor is really worth because our government has not been able to establish a better set of labor, immigration and education policies. BurgerFlipBot is a symbol of that government failure -- and a stark warning of what lies at the end of that road.

The US billionaire who helped bankroll Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency played a key role in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, the Observer has learned. It has emerged that Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, who helped to finance the Trump campaign and who was revealed this weekend as one of the owners of the rightwing Breitbart News Network, is a long-time friend of Nigel Farage. He directed his data analytics firm to provide expert advice to the Leave campaign on how to target swing voters via Facebook – a donation of services that was not declared to the electoral commission. Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years' experience in military disinformation campaigns and "election management", claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump's team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage. The communications director of Leave.eu,