I love when a game properly captures me, to the extent that I'm thinking about it throughout the day while going about my real life. It doesn't happen very often these days, because I have played too many games in the past 30 years and am becoming immune to their most common spells. When it does happen, it's usually because a game does something I haven't seen before – like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last year, with its madcap contraptions. Or sometimes – as with Dragon's Dogma 2, which I am very much still playing after reviewing it last week – it's because it does something I have seen before but not for a very long time. In the 12 years between the original Dragon's Dogma and this sequel, the only game that has come close to recapturing its chaotic and stubbornly idiosyncratic brand of fantasy action role-playing was Elden Ring.

AI is leaps and bounds from where it was years ago. I remember Windows 7 had introduced voice recognition as a feature. It didn't work great, but over time it did get better as it trained on your voice. Speed ahead to now and we have speech to text and voice recognition technologies that are almost perfect in the palms of our hands. If you know me, I've been messing around with Craiyon, an image generating AI and OpenAI's GPT-3 based models that generate text based upon a prompt.

COVID-19 has forced us all to think about new ways to avoid germs at work, while in public places like grocery stores and even in the privacy of our own homes. Fortunately, interior designers and manufacturers are responding to the demand and offering solutions for our homes that are aimed at reducing the spread of germs, viruses and other particles that may be harmful to our health. Industry professionals and home-goods retailers shared some of the more helpful ideas, new technologies and innovations currently available with NorthJersey.com, Smart home technology -- voice and motion-activated appliances and other features -- has grown tremendously in the recent past, and touchless options have expanded since COVID-19 to meet the demand. "Since May 1, the term'touchless' has been the GROHE website's number one searched term," says Stephany Osmas, a spokesperson for the manufacturer of kitchen and bathroom fixtures.

If you ever get the creepy feeling you're being monitored when you use your computer, smartphone or smart speaker, our guest Geoffrey Fowler is here to tell you you are. Fowler writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post. He's been investigating the ways our browsers and phone apps harvest personal information about us even while we're sleeping. And he discovered that Amazon had kept four years' worth of recorded audio from his home, captured by his Alexa smart speaker, including family conversations about medications and a friend doing a business transaction. Geoffrey Fowler joined the Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal, writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China. He writes his technology column from San Francisco. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies. You have a recent column. The headline is "I Found Your Data. It's For Sale." What kind of personal data did you find available for sale on the Internet? GEOFFREY FOWLER: I found all kinds of things that normal people would consider secrets and that corporations spend a lot of money - millions and millions of dollars - to try to keep out of the hands of their competitors and criminals. I found people's flight records. I found people's records from their doctors prescribing them medications. I found people's tax documents that they were - thought they were only sharing with their tax preparer. And they were available with one click. I could have opened them up and downloaded them. And where did this data come from?

A new 5G network is being created now, which will not only offer faster downloading on cell phones. It will provide the kind of connectivity we need in the era of the Internet of Things - driverless cars, Internet-connected medical devices, smart TVs and virtual assistants. But there are dangers that could be lurking in the equipment needed to build the new network. The Chinese telecommunications equipment giant Huawei is dominating the creation of 5G networks around the world. For years, classified intelligence reports from the U.S. have warned that China would one day use Huawei to penetrate American networks for cyber-espionage or cyberattacks. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has banned AT&T and Verizon from using Huawei products in America's 5G network. And last month, the U.S. had a top executive from Huawei arrested in Canada so she could be extradited to the U.S. The growing cyberthreat posed by China was stressed in the Worldwide Threat Assessment - a report from the U.S. intelligence community - that was released this week. And all this is part of the backdrop for this week's trade negotiations between the U.S. and China. My guest David Sanger is the author of a book about cyberwar and cyber-sabotage called "The Perfect Weapon." Let's start with the 5G network. And how will it affect our phones, our devices and all our interconnectivity? DAVID SANGER: Well, at its simplest, the 5G network is an increase in speed and range for what you see on your cell phone. So 5G means just fifth generation. The hope is that when you're using your phone or some other device over Wi-Fi, you'll get no lag time and that you'll get near instantaneous download of data, webpages and so forth.

The future of the driverless car is going to affect the future of how we travel and what we do in cars. But driverless cars are also likely to transform roads, cities, suburbs, jobs, the economy and daily life. My guest Samuel Schwartz expects it to be a very disruptive technology. Schwartz is the author of the new book "No One At The Wheel: Driverless Cars And The Road Of The Future," which he says is about the good, the bad and the ugly of how driverless cars will change our world. He knows a lot about transportation systems. He served as the traffic commissioner of New York City and chief engineer of the city's Department of Transportation. He now has his own consulting firm and has worked with cities around the world on transportation-related issues. Later in our conversation, after we talk about the future, we're going to talk about traffic problems that plague us today. We're going to use the words driverless car interchangeably with the words autonomous vehicle, or AV. In your book, you write that AVs, autonomous vehicles, will be the most disruptive technology to hit society worldwide since the advent of the motorcar. Give us a couple of examples of industries or jobs or roadways that we might not realize will be profoundly affected by AVs once they start to really dominate. SAMUEL SCHWARTZ: I think everybody is expecting fewer drivers, and, you know, that's no surprise. But it also means that there're probably going to be fewer repair shops because AVs lend themselves to fleet operations, especially if they're going to be offering rides, as opposed to selling maximum vehicles. So car dealerships may disappear. So this is going to have wide impacts. Truckers, of course, are going to be impacted - how we move about in so many different ways.

My guest Robert Draper says one of the greatest threats to our democracy is gerrymandering, in which the party in power in a state redraws the map of election districts to give the advantage to that party's candidates. Since districts are redrawn only every 10 years following the census, gerrymandering can almost guarantee that the majority party will stay in power. There are a couple of gerrymandering cases currently before the Supreme Court. Draper has reported on gerrymandering, and we'll talk about that a little later. First, we're going to talk about his new article "They Are Watching You - And Everything Else On The Planet" published in this month's National Geographic. It's about state-of-the-art surveillance from closed-circuit TV to drones and satellites and the questions these surveillance technologies raise about privacy. As part of his research, he spent time in surveillance control rooms in London. And he went to a tech company in San Francisco whose mission is to image the entire Earth every day. Draper is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. So let's start with surveillance. Why did you choose England as the place to report on surveillance? ROBERT DRAPER: Well, England has become kind of an obvious focal point to talk about surveillance. It's become, in a way, a petri dish for the subject, I suppose, for a couple reasons. First of all, the U.K. is where George Orwell wrote his dystopian classic "1984" back in 1949 when the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the USSR were his prime reference points.

Survival in Nintendo's fantasy epic for Wii U and its latest device -- Nintendo Switch -- requires a different set of skills compared to previous entries in The Legend of Zelda's 31-year run. You have to mind your stamina. You must preserve your weapons lest they break apart. And you need to cook your own food. It's a major reason why Breath of the Wild is one of the best launch titles for a new video game console ever, not to mention a journey worthy of Zelda's glorious reputation.