Having inspired a huge subgenre of political comedy, Jon Stewart, who walked away from The Daily Show in 2015, has returned to television in a determined but defensive crouch. That he's both worried about and pre-emptively rebelling against criticism is evident in the extremely '90s credit sequence that introduces his new weekly Apple TV show, The Problem With Jon Stewart. Over grinding, Rage Against the Machine -style guitars, the credits cycle through unflattering potential titles like The Money Grab With Jon Stewart before landing on a title that both sets up the show's format--each weekly episode deals with a central problem, like "War" or "Freedom"--and preempts the title of skeptical think pieces. Stewart plays defense as host too, alluding early and often to how old he looks and to how little his audience is laughing. Concerns that The Problem's writing staff might be too white and male, like The Daily Show's, are staved off by literally showing us Stewart bantering with his staff, which is admirably diverse.

At last week's Google I/O conference, a few choice terms came up repeatedly. They were mentioned so often that New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo joked that "machine learning" had reached "70 trillion" utterances only a few hours into the conference's first day. I have been counting occurrences of the phrase "now, we use machine learning" here at Google IO and I got to 70 trillion Google is using AI to improve just about every realm of its vast technology empire. On Android, for example, the company announced an update to its virtual assistant with futuristic features like Google Lens, which can "read" photos in real time. It also announced a hyper-fast AI processor built to grow its cloud computing business, and a more "proactive" Google Home product. With Google Lens, your smartphone camera won't just see what you see, but will also understand what you see to help you take action.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. "I wake up every morning with an opportunity to learn something new," says McDonough. "My job is challenging, exciting, and different every day."

"Data is key to both machine and deep learning," explains McDonough, "data in conjunction with a strong algorithm are the keys to success. Mega clouds have been attractive to customers because they make it easier to setup, operationalize and expand. They additionally offer ancillary services to be leveraged. Today most consider Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform as the industry's biggest public cloud vendors. These three'mega clouds' are the market leaders, but McDonough speculated that this may not always be the case for AI.

Drones are used for aerial photography, surveillance, news coverage, and rescue operations. Now a group of scientists and researchers are figuring out if drones can make it rain. The science is called cloud seeding, and it is being tested in Nevada at an FAA site, four hours north of Las Vegas. Seeding clouds involves releasing flares of silver iodide from a plane's wing to generate more ice particles in a cloud. This aims to help a cloud's ability to produce and enhance precipitation. The weather conditions need to be right for this to take place--cloud cover and even the presence of storms are optimal.

"OK, this one is pretty cool," said 6-foot-tall Omar Tayeb as he held his left hand in front of himself and snapped it with his iPhone. He left it there as an app detected each of his fingernails and proceeded to paint each one. On the phone's screen, Tayeb's nails turned a dazzling shade of Maybelline purple. "So the app was able to detect where my nails were, paint them in one of Maybelline's nail polish colors, then adjust to the room's lighting so it looks natural," Tayeb said. And it is impressive, given that as little as five years ago the smartest smartphones would have struggled to recognize the most basic of images, let alone identify individual fingernails and accurately color them.

The Obama administration wants the U.S. to be a world leader in economic and defense policy related to a new wave of automation powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Tuesday. "We can return to these questions in a way that America can kind of set the space and then set the parameters for how we go about it," McDonough said during a White House conversation on the topic that he moderated. The conversation comes as the White House looks to wrap up its string of workshops on artificial intelligence Thursday. In May, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced plans to explore the uses and risks of AI. Since then the office has hosted three workshops and another event on the matter.

Your job may end up being done by a computer in the not-so-distant future, according to participants in a White House-hosted discussion on Tuesday. The discussion addressed how the future of automation can provide many social and economic advantages, but could also be a major disadvantage for those who would lose their jobs to robots. "There are fantastic things to be very excited about," said Martin Ford, author of two books on the future of automation. He cautioned that increased automation could have major detriments for the labor market. "Almost any kind of work that is on some level routine and predictable is very highly susceptible to [automation]."

This is the latest installment in a regular series of conversations with William McDonough (@billmcdonough), designer, architect, author and entrepreneur. Joel Makower: Tell me about the innovation future roundtable you recently convened. Bill McDonough: I have been working with companies that are looking at the future of mobility in India, and designing factories and other things for them. The chairman said he would like to connect to some of the advanced thinking across many sectors and integrate that with some conversations that he could participate in. The first person I thought of for that was Jack Hidary.