Google Gemini continues to push the limits of what it knows about you. On Wednesday, Google's big initiative was a way to stop Gemini from learning more about you, while notifying users that content you share with it may be used as a foundation for chats with other users. "In the coming weeks, your'Gemini Apps Activity' setting will be renamed'Keep Activity,'" Google said in a blog post. "When this setting is on, a sample of your future uploads will be used to help improve Google services for everyone." Today, Google is allowing Gemini to remember what it knows about you, and this behavior is on by default. "When this setting is on, Gemini remembers key details and preferences you've shared, leading to more natural and relevant conversations, as if you're collaborating with a partner who's already up to speed," Google said.

Can you tell what a completely random person is like just by staring at a selfie? Selfies can't automatically give away personality traits to the human eye. This is where AI has just gotten more fascinating or downright scarier, depending on how you see it. Artificial neural networks are now able to figure out what your next potential date (or anyone else) could be like just by being creepy. AI developed by a team of Russian scientists can predict traits like agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion just by scanning photos. It could be revolutionary for finding optimal matches not just for dating, but also customer service and online tutoring, among other things.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. I am your new god, you useless being. I've been praying that more would come to light ever since the existence of a God-bot religion called Way of the Future was revealed this fall. At the time, Wired's Mark Harris said he'd seen state filings from California that revealed a religion with AI as its god. Charmingly, he said it was founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google, Waymo and Uber engineer now embroiled in a lawsuit brought by Alphabet-owned Waymo against Uber.

When I heard five or so years back that people in Silicon Valley were getting worried about artificial intelligence causing human extinction, my initial reaction was extreme skepticism. A large reason for that was that the scenario just felt silly. What did these folks think would happen -- was some company going to build Skynet and manufacture Terminator robots to slaughter anyone who stood in their way? It felt like a sci-fi fantasy, not a real problem. This is a misperception that frustrates a lot of AI researchers.

For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating more than 170 million cameras so far. In a December test of the dragnet in Guiyang, a city of 4.3 million people in southwest China, a BBC reporter was flagged for arrest within seven minutes of police adding his headshot to a facial recognition database. And in the southeast city of Nanchang, Chinese police say that last month they arrested a suspect wanted for "economic crimes" after a facial recognition system spotted him at a pop concert amidst 60,000 other attendees. These types of stories, combined with reports that computer vision recognizes some types of images more accurately than humans, makes it seem like the Panopticon has officially arrived. In the US alone, 117 million Americans, or roughly one in two US adults, have their picture in a law enforcement facial-recognition database.

Henry Wellman is the Harold W. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Kimberly Brink is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov collected a series of his short stories on robots in his now famous anthology I, Robot. The series "revolutionized science fiction ... and made robots far more interesting than they ever had been," according to the Saturday Evening Post. I, Robot begins with a lesser-known story: Robbie.

Everyone's favorite creepy Google tool is about to help Google get even creepier. Wired reports that the cameras Google uses to create imagery on its Street View service have gotten their first upgrade in eight years. Now, the vehicles use eight cameras to capture sharper images of the roads, a rig better suited to 2017 than 2009. But perhaps the most important cameras on the vehicles are the two high-definition units facing perpendicular to the direction of travel. Those units record images of stores, road signs, and other objects at the side of the road in incredible detail--and information gleaned from the data will feed Google's ever-hungry machine-learning algorithms.

The one redeeming feature of a spider is that the webs they create are usually too small, or too weak, to entrap a human. But Festo continues to corner the market on unsettling and slightly creepy robots with a machine that can create giant webs and even 3D cocoons that could easily hold a human hostage. The 3D Cocooner's web is made of a soft flexible thread that's coated in a liquid plastic resin. As it's being extruded, a UV light on the print head hardens the material giving the webs and cocoons the robot creates instant structure without the need for additional supports to be created A built-in saw slices the material when the robot's print head needs to move to another location, but the special resin can also be softened again at any time allowing beams and supports to be angled, repositioned, or connected to other parts of the 3D cocoon during the printing process. Admittedly, the 3D Cocooner doesn't really look as creepy as a spider. It has no beady eyes or menacing fangs, but the fact that it could quickly entomb you in its resin web is more than enough reason to question why this research needs to continue.