To build one family's dream house on a flood-prone Mississippi bayou, AD100 architect Tom Kundig decided the sky's the limit. Tom Kundig absorbed lessons in resilience before he even knew the word. As a child, he saw many of the industrial and agricultural buildings of the rural Pacific Northwest abandoned but still standing, the harsh winter conditions no match for their steel columns. That background came in handy when he was asked to design a house for a young family on a coastal Mississippi site susceptible to severe flooding. The clients, Joel and Jill Kavanaugh, had fallen in love with a plot bordering the Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Tech has been encroaching on the family domicile for years--but actor, writer, and satirist Jill Kargman is all in on analog. My husband Harry works in tech, and every January he makes his yearly pilgrimage to Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where some 4,100 exhibitors are spread across 2.6 million square feet. The dominant concept at this year's edition was that, very soon, anything you put in your house will be compatible with voice-activated AI services like Siri, Alexa, or HomePod. Your newest home automation systems will come equipped with sensors and jazzy master controls on an iPad. The problem for me is that a tiny photoelectric cell you frantically wave to--rather than a switch to flick or press--rarely acknowledges me, because somehow I'm not human temperature.

One word: AI – Many of the world's leaders in the field of science and technology, including the late Stephen Hawking, Telsa founder Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, have all expressed concern in recent years over the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) – most notably its potential use in autonomous weapons. Along with many in academia and human rights groups, the science and tech visionaries have warned that in the wrong hands there is a serious danger posed by AI. One concern is that these weapons could be designed to be extremely difficult to simply "turn off," as the Future of Life Institute noted in its report on the development of autonomous weapon platforms. That could result in a scenario straight out of science fiction where humans lose control of their dangerous creations. While it may not mean a world-ending scenario presented in The Terminator, even losing control of a few AI weapons temporarily could result in unnecessary mass causalities or worse.

But then it comes back and bites you," Paul Ford, cofounder of the platform-builder Postlight, told me. "You end up in these situations where 80 percent works, 19.9 percent is hard but there's an answer that makes sense, and the last 0.1 percent is absolutely insane." Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico.