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Computer scientists agree that artificial intelligence will have a stunning impact on the future of humanity. And more often than not, futurists depict a dystopian outcome – a world where we are at best subservient to machines and at worst exterminated by them. Computer scientist Stuart Russell, one of the world’s top experts on AI and author of the recently published “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control,” will join us at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI (March 3 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall) ), to discuss how researchers and founders today will determine AI’s ultimate impact.

At a time when the debate about AI seems to be polarized between the alarmists predicting the imminent “singularity” and those pooh-poohing the advent of human-level AI, Dr. Russell, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, cuts through the debate to argue that we still have time to ensure that the doomsayers are proven wrong. As Dr. Russell argues in “Human Compatible,” the key is to ensure that AI designs “will necessarily defer to humans: they will ask permission, they will accept correction, and they will allow themselves to be switched off.”

Dr. Russell believes that super human-level AI is likely a generation or two away, though he allows that unexpected breakthroughs – like Leo Szilard’s totally unexpected breakthrough on nuclear chain reactions in 1933 – could hasten the day. Regardless of the timeline, Dr. Russell argues that the current approach to AI is dangerous to the future of humanity. For his part, Dr. Russell is literally re-writing his textbook on AI to advance what he has described as a Jeeves-like humility in  future AI systems and spurring related research through organizations like The Center for Human Compatible AI (CHAI).

Join our 4th annual TC Sessions: Robotics & AI on March 3 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall for a remarkable day with the world’s top roboticists, investors, founders, and AI engineers. The day features a full day or programming lead by TechCrunch’s editors on the main stage, a pitch-off competition featuring early-stage startups, numerous breakout and speaker Q&A sessions, and much more.

Get your early bird pass here. Interested in sponsoring? Please get in touch.

Google has terminated Rebecca Rivers, an employee activist the company put on indefinite administrative leave this month, Rivers tweeted this afternoon.

Earlier this month, Google put Rivers and Laurence Berland on leave for allegedly violating company policies. At the time, Google said one had searched for and shared confidential documents that were not pertinent to their job, and one had looked at the individual calendars of some staffers.

Protestors on Friday, however, said Google was punishing Berland and Rivers for speaking out against the company. The rally, where both Berland and Rivers spoke, was in protest of their administrative leaves.

Ahead of the rally, organizers said the “attack” on Rivers and Berland “is an attack on all people who care about transparency and accountability for tech.” Organizers pointed to how Rivers helped create the petition to demand Google end its contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and how Berland has participated in a number of worker-organized campaigns, including the one resisting YouTube’s role in facilitating hate speech.

Since the massive employee-led walkout last November, organizers say Google has tried to undermine further attempts to organize. In July, walkout co-organizer Meredith Whittaker left the company following reports of retaliation in April. Organizers of the rally say both Rivers and Berland were put on leave for “simply looking at openly shared internal information.”

This comes shortly after The New York Times reported Google hired an anti-union firm, ISI Consultants. Google employees, who the Times kept anonymous, discovered Google’s relationship with ISI via internal calendar entries.

I’ve reached out to Google and will update this story if I hear back.

Elon Musk took a big swipe at Ford during the unveiling of the Cybertruck. Mid-presentation, he played a video of a Cybertruck pulling an F-150 in what was pitched as a head-to-head contest. Many have questioned if it was a fair fight (I don’t think it was)… including Sundeep Madra, VP of Ford X, the automaker’s venture incubator.

Madra tweeted to Elon Musk today, calling for Tesla’s CEO to send Ford a Cybertruck to do an “apples to apples” test.

The test showed by Tesla is questionable on several levels. First, the Cybertruck is dramatically heavier, particularly in the rear-end. The Ford used in the test appears to be in 2-wheel drive mode running on older tires. Without weight on the rear wheels, and the front axle spinning freely, the Ford is at the mercy of the heavier all-wheel drive Cybertruck.

The Ford appears to be a mid-level XLT trim and it’s impossible to identify the engine used. However, the truck lacks the badging used with Ford’s top-of-the-line 3.5L Ecoboost, which seems to indicate the truck sports a lower-end V8 or Ford’s smaller 2.7L Ecoboost. Either way, it’s not a fair fight under the hood.

Other factors are at play, too. The Cybertruck pulls first, increasing the Tesla’s traction and decreasing the Ford’s. (Also, Tesla, when towing a vehicle from a standstill, it’s critical to ensure the slack is removed from the line. It’s dangerous to do otherwise. That line can snap.)

In the end, though these butt-to-butt pull challenges are fun to watch but don’t prove much relevant to the real world. A better tow test would involve weighted trailers and conclusions based off of range and weight.

Ford is among a handful of automakers developing an electric pickup that will compete against the Tesla Cybertruck. The F-150 is the automaker’s best selling vehicle and critical to its balance sheet.

The Cybertruck upends decades of truck styling and functionality by taking the unibody form and function to an extreme. The polarizing design has lead to countless memes and digs at Tesla, but also over 200,000 in pre-orders in just a few days.

Almost as soon as “Baby Yoda” (or “Yoda Baby”?) debuted on the wildly popular new Disney Plus series “The Mandalorian,” a thousand internet memes bloomed in its wake.

Yet, nearly as quickly as the image took hold everywhere online, it was mysteriously pulled — as if a thousand bounty hunters all got the same tracking fob.

Initially, outlets like Vulture, which had a slew of adorable baby Yoda images, blamed an overabundance of caution from Walt Disney Co. for the disappearance of everyone’s favorite new adorable Star Wars alien. But Disney, it turns out, (surprisingly) wasn’t to blame for the disappearance of Yoda Baby.

Rather it was Giphy, the maven of meme generation that was behind the dastardly deed, as initially reported by the BBC.

After pounding the side of his new Cybertruck with a sledgehammer with not a mark left behind, Elon Musk turned his focus to the “Tesla Armor Glass”.

As we all saw, the glass did not fare so well. A toss of a steel ball into the window caused it to splinter, catching everyone on stage off guard. “Oh my [bleeping] God,” said Musk.

A repeat attempt on the rear window had the same results, leaving the truck with cracks awkwardly sprawled across its glass for the remainder of the presentation.

In hindsight, Elon says they probably should’ve done the window demo before they smacked the truck with a big ol’ hammer.

Elon tweets:

Would the window have cracked regardless of order? At least on stage, they only pounded on the front door panel; were these hits enough to crack the base of the glass on the rear door, too? It’s probably impossible for anyone outside of Tesla to say with certainty, but that seems pretty wild.

The night after the announcement, Elon tweeted out a video of their tests “right before launch”, in which the window seemingly had no problems:

Some commenters postulated (assuming that the truck in the video was the same one on stage) that these earlier tests could’ve primed the window for failure — that the test hits weakened the glass, even if they didn’t visibly damage them.

Whatever the cause, the glass cracked — twice. The (literal) damage is done. But while the broken windows have become something of a meme, it’s not as if the failed demo wiped out interest; Musk says that, as of Sunday night, over 200,000 people had put down refundable $100 deposits (so over $20M in deposits in all) on the truck. And with the Cybertruck not expected to go into production until late 2021, I’d be surprised if Tesla doesn’t make some tweaks and find some over-the-top way to demonstrate V2 of the truck’s glass before then.

Over the years, Trinity Ventures has racked up many exits for its limited partners.

Through deals in consumer brands like Starbucks and Zulily and enterprise companies like TubeMogul and New Relic, the Menlo Park-based fund has found repeated success, but as it retrenches with a pared-down investment team and a much smaller new fund, Trinity’s investors have some thoughts about what lies ahead for the venture capital community.

As the firm’s partners consider what’s in store for 2020, they emphasize that entrepreneurs will have to focus on public policy; blockchain will experience a renaissance; a recession is coming and the accessibility of data and an aging global population will continue to reshape healthcare markets.

The firm is currently in the process of closing what would be its smallest fund in years, a $250 million investment vehicle, first disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July. That fund, as first reported by Crunchbase News, is the firm’s most modest vehicle in nearly 20 years; the last time Trinity raised less than $300 million was in 1998.

Even as it invests from a smaller vehicle, the team is still putting capital to work in deals like the human resources-focused technology startup, Cultivate; the interbank payment company, Baton; Squire, a payment and booking management platform for barbershops and salons, and Valtix, an enterprise security company.

For Patricia Nakache, an investor in companies like Turo, Care.com, and ThredUp, understanding regulation and public policy will have to become part of the job for budding entrepreneurs and big companies alike.

Amazon announced a new capability today called Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels to help customers train machine learning models to understand a set of objects when there is a limited set of information.

Typically, machine learning models have to work on large data sets to learn something like what’s a picture of a dog, as opposed to some other animals. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can work with a limited data set to teach the algorithm a group of objects specific to a given use case.

“Instead of having to train a model from scratch, which requires specialized machine learning expertise and millions of high-quality labeled images, customers can now use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels to achieve state-of-the-art performance for their unique image analysis needs,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.

For example, you may want to teach the model to identify a set of engine parts, a limited set of information, which has a lot of meaning to a specific use case. Less information like this actually poses a problem for most machine learning models, but this feature has been designed specifically to learn from a smaller amount of data. Instead of hundreds or thousands of images, Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can work with as few as ten images to learn to identify the object.

Amazon has gotten flack from the ACLU and shareholders in the past for selling Amazon Rekognition to law enforcement to help identify faces. This feature offers a more benign use of similar technology.

The new feature goes live next week on December 3rd, right in time for AWS re:Invent, the company’s customer conference taking place in Las Vegas.

CBS’s over-the-top streaming service, CBS All Access, is the latest to counter the threat from Disney+ by investing in children’s programming. Today, the company is launching a kids’ programming lineup including original shows and other library content. Plus, in one of the first major content integrations ahead of the ViacomCBS merger, the CBS streaming service will soon add a selection of Nickelodeon children’s TV shows to its catalog.

The first Nickelodeon titles will roll out in January, the company says.

In August, CBS had announced plans to launch children’s programming on its service by way of deals with WildBrain (formerly DHX Media) and Boat Rocker Studios. With WildBrain, CBS licensed the kids’ TV series “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” produced with Sony Pictures Animation. And with Boat Rocker, CBS licensed the new “Danger Mouse,” produced with BBC Children’s Productions.

The two shows are the first original children’s series on the service, which today is better known for its original programming aimed at adults, like “Star Trek: Discovery,” “The Good Fight,” “The Twilight Zone,” and soon “Star Trek: Picard.”

Today, its two originals are now live for subscribers alongside a library of kids’ content that includes “Bob the Builder,” “Inspector Gadget,” “Madeline,” “Heathcliff,” “The Adventures of Paddington Bear,” and the original “Danger Mouse.”

Over the next several weeks, CBS says it plans to grow its kids’ library to over 1,000 episodes as more TV series are added.

“Bringing children’s programming to CBS All Access is a significant step toward providing even more value for our subscribers and now for their children as well,” said Marc DeBevoise, President and COO, CBS Interactive, in a statement. “We’re bringing to market a fantastic roster of exclusive originals along with a library of marquee series for families, and we look forward to continuing to expand our children’s programming offering, especially with the future addition of incredible programming from Nickelodeon.”

The company did not specify which titles from Nickelodeon would come to CBS All Access, but it’s possible the lineup could include shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants” or “Dora the Explorer,” which went over to Amazon Prime Video after Viacom pulled them off Netflix back in 2013. Today, some of the early seasons of those shows and others are available as part of Amazon Prime’s free streaming perk, while later seasons can only be rented or purchased.

Plus, “Spongebob,” “Dora,” and other classic Nickelodeon kids’ shows are not included in Nickelodeon’s new agreement with Netflix, which is focused on new, original content using both well-known characters and all-new IP. According to The NYT, that deal was valued at $200 million.

It would make sense for CBS All Access to eventually absorb Viacom’s kids’ streaming service Noggin, which is where you can today find “Dora,” along with other shows like “PAW Patrol,” “Peppa Pig, “Team Umizoomi,” “Wallykazam,” “Bubble Guppies,” “Rusty Rivets,” “Blue’s Clues,” “Blaze,” “Shimmer & Shine,” “Max & Ruby,” “Wonder Pets,” “Nia Hao, Kai-Lan,” and several others to round out CBS All Access as a more family-friendly streaming service with a wide catalog in order to better compete with Netflix, Hulu and of course, Disney+. Once a combined company, it doesn’t make sense to ask its customer base to subscribe to both services or choose between them.

Apple has released its annual holiday ad, just in time for Thanksgiving. Named “The Surprise,” the ad focuses on two young girls who spend a lot of time playing with an iPad.

The ad focuses on a family that travels across the country to visit the mother’s father. Like many families, the parents hand them an iPad when their daughters start to fight…

When they arrive at the grandfather’s house, we realize that the grandfather’s wife recently passed away. Both the grandfather and the mother are still mourning.

While their parents tell the kids to watch something on the iPad, they end up using the iPad to build a touching slideshow using old family photos.

In other news, Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds has invested an undisclosed amount in a company selling prepaid phone plans called Mint Mobile. It all sounds like a weird sponsored Instagram post, but a source tells TechCrunch that Reynolds now owns more than 25% of the company with this recent investment. What he invested is thoroughly unclear and a Mint Mobile spokesperson did not comment on the company’s valuation.

Mint Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, meaning the company does not actually own the network infrastructure it operates on. It uses T-Mobile’s cellular infrastructure. The MVNO launched beneath Costa Mesa, California-based Ultra Mobile in 2016 and the brand was only recently incorporated as its own entity. Ultra Mobile CEO David Glickman is also the CEO of Mint Mobile. 

MVNOs are vehicles to create a new carrier brand without having to worry about all of the infrastructure barriers of entry. As the T-Mobile and Sprint deal wraps up and T-Mobile’s scrappy “uncarrier” marketing slows down, there may be more attention being paid to these smaller MVNO entities.

Ultra Mobile has carved out a niche focusing largely on prepaid plans for low-income immigrants in the United States. The company’s online-only Mint Mobile brand seems to have been an effort for the company to bring a younger demographic onto its service. The company sells 3, 6 and 12-month prepaid blocks of wireless service, their cheapest regular-priced option being a $15 per month plan (billed annually).

Bringing Reynolds onboard certainly seems to be an effort to bring a star with a substantial social media following into the fold. Celebrity deals where recognizable names put up some cash and supply a big PR boost for the startup are far from rare. Andreessen Horowitz has built an entire fund around getting celebrities into startup deals. Retired NFL running back Marshawn Lynch is the public face of Beast Mobile, another MVNO.

“Celebrities generally invest in high-end products like skincare brands or delicious gin companies,” Reynolds said in a press release. “Yet Mint is making wireless way more affordable at a time when the average American is paying 65 dollars a month.” Reynolds is also an owner of Aviation Gin.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Wireless.